Quotes About Emptiness

I cannot write if there is a sense of plenitude. I have to hypothesize that there is a loss.

I do feel at a loss for not having a child of my own at times, very much so.

Tell me, do you sometimes find yourself unaccountably sad on some days?

It's like having a head full of holes, in which the perfect repository of words have shamed themselves, he lamented.

he ceased to exist for a long time, living among friends but gaunt and ghostly, one of the disappeared. He had lost many voices: the lawyer's, the impresario's, the lover's, and it isn't surprising that he found speaking or even coherence difficult.

Most people think it's normal to have a nameless sorrow at the bottom of your soul.

For it must be very lonely being dead.

They were like amputees, only it was not a limb they were missing, but their very souls.

Not even a ghost could survive here.

I do a job which I ought to find satisfying, and it leaves me bored and empty. A diet of milk and honey, when you have teeth, he observed.

Between the sun there is no one

Each moment of zazen is equally wholeness of practice, equally wholeness of realization. This is not only practice while sitting, it is like a hammer striking emptiness: before and after, its exquisite peal permeates everywhere. How can it be limited to this moment?

The thinness of contemporary life. I can poke my finger through it.

That clean but lonely feeling when there are no other cars. The traffic lights changing just for you.

The world is full of abandoned meanings.

Only absences were fully shared.

I moonlight, except there's nothing I'm moonlighting from. Moonlight is all that's out there.

I moonlight except that there's nothing I'm moonlighting from. Moonlight is all that's out there.

Most of our longings go unfulfilled.

They are lonely. I'm not talking about lonely for a lover or a friend. I mean lonely in the universal sense, lonely inside the understanding that we are tiny people on a tiny little earth suspended in an endless void that echoes past stars and stars of stars.

When a person has no other persons he invents them because he was not designed to be alone, because it isn't good for a person to be alone.

piles of underpants, shirts and outer clothing. . . . Three men were shooting like robots, their eyes were empty, with a cadaverous glassy shine. . . .

He hesitated then, anticipating the panic that came when there was nothing left to read. - Guido Brunetti

I missed her so much I wanted to die: a hard, physical longing, like a craving for air underwater.