Quotes About Emptiness

The heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is: the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.

They mentioned everything but one thing: that she had left the point in a bedroom in Encino.

A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty," Philippe Ariès wrote to the point of this aversion in Western Attitudes toward Death. "But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.

She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping card.

She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping cart.

Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation. A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty, Philippe Aries wrote to the point of this aversion in Western Attitudes toward Death. But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.

She thought about nothing. Her mind was a blank tape, imprinted daily with snatches of things overheard, fragments of dealers' patter, the beginning of jokes and odd lines of song lyrics.

A single person is missing for you and the whole world is empty.

Tell me what matters,' BZ said. 'Nothing,' Maria said.

It's all gone with you, he said. It used to be there but it's gone. Listen, she said as if by rote. I love you.

No hi ha res que pesi tant com el buit.

Seeing her sitting there unresponsive makes me realize that silence has a sound.

In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who lose a child.

What was wrong with me? I had a decent life. I was healthy. I wasn't starving or maimed by a land mine or orphaned. Yet somehow, it wasn't enough. I had a hole in me, and everything I took for granted slipped through it like sand. I felt like I had swallowed yeast, like whatever evil was festering inside me had doubled in size.

If she spoke, she would tell him the truth: she was not okay at all, but horribly empty, now that she knew what it was like to be filled.

That's the paradox of loss: How can something that's gone weigh us down so much?

What she hadn't realized was that sometimes when your vision was that sharp and true, it could cut you. That only if you'd felt such fullness could you really understand the ache of being empty.

Missed opportunities were never superficial wounds; they cut straight to the bone.

It doesn't matter what it is that leaves a hole inside you. It just matters that it's there.

You can miss a person you've never known.

Whether it was power they sought, or revenge, or love-well, those were all just different forms of hunger. The bigger the hole inside you, the more desperate you became to fill it.

Ross held her face between his hands and kissed her. He tasted doubt on her tongue and pain on the roof of her mouth. He swallowed these, and drank again. Consumed, she had no choice but to see how empty he was inside, and how, sip by sip, she filled him.

Wheather it is conscious or not, you eventually make the decision to divide your life in half - before and after - with loss being that tight bubble in the middle. You can move around in spite of it; you can laugh and smile and carry on with your life, but all it takes is one slow range of motion, a doubling over, to be fully aware of the empty space at your center.

You have to understand what you're missing before you can really feel a loss.