Quotes About Emptiness

I am a hollow shell, the crab's died, there's nothing left inside. Don't they know that?

Catelyn had not eaten today. Perhaps that had been unwise. She told herself that there had been no time, but the truth was that food had lost its savor in a world without Ned. 'When they took his head off, they killed me too.

His wits have gone dark as his eyes

I can now see to the bottom of my own depths, there is nothing stopping my gaze, no obstacle is in the way. And there is nothing there.

Hell, Madame, is to love no longer.

No one discovers the depths of his own loneliness.

Hell, madam, is to love no longer.

But people talk too much. They talk and talk so much that when the time comes there's nothing left in their words. They're like the dust you raise when you're winnowing grain.

Tiens, une ville qu'on traverse la nuit, et tout à coup tu dépasses la dernière maison, tu retombes dans le silence, comme dans le vide.

A gap will yawn, achingly, day by day, it will turn into a colossal pit, an abyss without foundation, a gradual invasion of words by margins, blank and insignificant, so that all of us, to a man, will find nothing to say.

What an austere landscape! Borluut was alone, with nothing but the sky and water. No footsteps, apart from his own, marked the immense expanse, the white desert which this ancient outer harbour of Bruges now was.

Why, despite the blinding brightness, did everything look gray? It was as if the painfully sharp lights were helpless to dispel all the darkness the people had brought in from the night outside.

The skulls were there and I could say something with them. To me they are as beautiful as anything I know. To me they are strangely more living than the animals walking around -- hair, eyes and all, with the tails switching. The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert even though it is vast and empty and untouchable-- and knows no kindness with all its beauty.

Perchè? Perchè? Perchè se dormi, quando ti svegli sei cambiato. Sì, i cipressi neri sono pericolosi. Mentre dormi, le loro radici ti crescono nel cervello e te lo rubano, e quando ti svegli sei matto, con la testa vuota come uno zufolo».

My outer success did not change the inner state of my mind and heart. Part of me kept insisting there had to be more to life than this. I do not remember consciously thinking that I was a seeker or that I was looking for my home for peace of mind. But I do remember well that chronic state of emptiness and sadness, superimposed on giant pools of damned-up inside tears. In nearly every area of my life, I felt no one really understood me and I understood nothing at all.

We can perform service to others for a variety of reasons. We can do good deeds because of fear, guilt, or the desire to inflate our egos. But if we really want to be loving, if we truly wish to respond to the call of justice and freedom, we must first have the courage to look into our own emptiness. We must somehow even come to love it.

Gabito would say later that he had no memory of his mother. She had left him before he could retain any memories at all.

I don't see her anymore. We don't even go through the motions. Ozren had been right about one thing: some stories just don't have happy endings.

Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man.

Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling into at night. I miss you like hell.

I have been very happy, very rich, very beautiful, much adulated, very famous and very unhappy.

While you cannot resolve what you are, at last you will be nothing.

Vessels never give so great a sound as when they are empty.

Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide, wide sea.