Quotes About Emptiness

What do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul? Why would you say anything?

There were few nights lying in the dark that he did not envy the dead.

Se quedó escuchando el goteo del agua en el bosque. Lecho rocoso, este. El frío y el silencio. Las cenizas del mundo difunto trajinadas de acá para allá por los crudos y transitorios vientos en el vacío. Llevadas, esparcidas y llevadas de nuevo. Todo desencajado de su apuntalamiento. Sin soporte en el viento cinéreo. Sostenido por una respiración, temblorosa y breve. Ojalá mi corazón fuese de piedra.

The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.

The following evening as they rode up onto the western rim they lost one of the mules. It went skittering off down the canyon wall with the contents of the panniers exploding soundlessly in the hot dry air and it fell through sunlight and through shade, turning in that lonely void until it fell from sight into a sink of cold blue space that absolved it forever of memory in the mind of any living thing that was.

Salió a la gris luz y se quedó allí de pie y fugazmente vio la verdad absoluta del mundo. El frío y despiado girar de la tierra intestada. Oscuridad implacable. Los perros ciegos del sol en su carrera. El aplastante vacío negro del universo. Y en alguna parte dos animales perseguidos temblando como zorros escondidos en su madriguera. Tiempo prestado y mundo prestado y ojos prestados con que llorarlo.

The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void.

He spoke into a blackness without depth or dimension.

There seemed insufficient substance to him to be the object of men's wrath. There seemed nothing about him sufficient to fuel any enterprise at all.

It was still dark and the fire had long since died, still dark and quiet with that silence that seems to be of itself listening

Things will be better when everybody's gone. They will? Sure they will. Better for who? Everybody.

No one spoke. There was none to curse and none to pray, we just watched.

Where did everybody go? And that's how it will be. What's wrong with that?

Quando non ti resta nient'altro imbastisci cerimoniali sul nulla e soffiaci sopra

Now come days of begging, days of theft. Days of riding where there rode no soul save he.

keeping to the firmer sand below the tidewrack. They stood, their clothes flapping softly. Glass floats covered with a gray crust. The bones of seabirds. At the tide line a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as eye could see like an isocline of death. One vast salt sepulchre. Senseless. Senseless.

He built no fire. He lay listening to the horse crop the grass at his stakerope and he listened to the wind in the emptiness and watched stars trace the arc of the hemisphere and die in the darkness at the edge of the world and as he lay there the agony in his heart was like a stake.

This is a dog. He is dead too. This

Death is not a lover.

There was nothing along the road save the country it traversed and there was nothing in the country at all.

Die Toten können deine Liebe nicht erwidern.

Dark and cold and no wind and a thin gray reef beginning along the eastern rim of the world. He walked out on the prairie and stood holding his hat like some supplicant to the darkness over them all and he stood there for a long time.

Nothing moved in that purgatorial waste save carnivorous birds. By

Alone in the empty shell of a house the squatter watched through the moteblown glass a rimshard of bonecolored moon come cradling up over the black balsams on the ridge, ink trees a facile hand sketched against the paler dark of winter heavens.