Quotes About Emptiness

Some people we glimpse as chasms, briefly but deeply, even to the death of us. Others are shallow places you never seem to get across.

The women were blank, shining areas with photographs of sad girls floating in them.

She knew: shit, we might as well have been drinking a dog's tears. Nothing mattered except that we were alive.

You can't burgulate a forgotten, empty house," he said, horrified at my stupidity.

The woman hurt me. She looked so soft and perfect, like a mannequin made of flesh, flesh all the way through.

Skip experienced no excitement. Only the lethargy and sadness of a man freezing to death.

It was a long straight road through dry fields as far as a person could see. You'd think the sky didn't have any air in it, and the earth was made of paper. Rather than moving, we were just getting smaller and smaller.

Buddhist Barbie In the 5th century B.C. an Indian philosopher Gautama teaches All is emptiness and There is no self. In the 20th century A.D. Barbie agrees, but wonders how a man with such a belly could pose, smiling, and without a shirt.

He had no idea what missing was. Missing was lying in the dampness of your tears night after night. Missing was a constant hollow spot in the center of your chest. Missing was a yawning ache that was never satisfied.

His life had no meaning. It was intolerable. The last three decades had been a hollow waste of time. Hands

And often the worst thing wasn't the victims--they were dead, after all, and beyond any more pain. The worst thing was those who loved them and survived them. Often the walking dead from now on, shell-shocked, hearts ruptured, stumbling through the remainder of their lives without anything left inside of them but blood and organs, impervious to pain, having learned nothing except that the worst things did, in fact, sometimes happen. (Mystic River)

But as the years passed, he missed her more not less, and his need for her became a cut that would not scar over, would not stop leaking.

I don't have room in my heart for most people. Got nothing against them, but I got nothing for them, either.

When you long with all your heart for someone to love you, a madness grows there that shakes all sense from the trees and the water and the earth. And nothing lives for you, except the long deep bitter want. And this is what everyone feels from birth to death.

I had come with such pain and labour to a place where emptiness had arrived before me. I was too late, something black and hollow had overtaken me and wriggled through the door.

These are the days when, however simple the future, we do not go towards it but leave part of life in a lobby whose elevators divide and enclose us, brightening digits that show exactly where we are headed, while a young Polish woman is emptying an ashtray, and we are drawn to a window whose strings, if we pull them, widen an emptiness.

I think perhaps the greatest burden lies in caring for those we cannot help. Not in having no one for whom to care? Fraser paused before answering; he might have been weighing the position of the pieces on the table. That is emptiness, he said at last, softly. But no great burden

I cried then, holding nothing back. For empty years, yearning for the touch of a hand. Hollow years, lying beside a man I had betrayed, for whom I had no tenderness. For the terrors and doubts and griefs of the day. Cried for him and me and for Mary MacNab, who knew what loneliness was—and what love was, as well.

It took two days, and God kens well that I recall every second of those days—yet it seems that I lost her between one heartbeat and the next. And I—I keep lookin' for her there, in that space between.

my heart went to water and drained from my chest.

I knew from the first glimpse that he was dead. But I ran to him". There was no way in which to describe his feelings, because he hadn't had any. The world had simply ceased in that moment, and with it, all his knowledge of how things were done. He simply could not see how life might continue. The first lesson of adult life was it, horribly, did.

Nothing." He pulled his

I knew too well that deadness of heart; the sense of sleepwalking through days and lying open-eyed at night, finding no rest, knowing only emptiness that was not peace.

I no longer knew what it was like to feel Australian.