Quotes About Emptiness

She runs the entire meal down the garbage disposal and goes hungry, a hunger more wonderful than any meal.

Adam doesn't get people. They say things to hide what they mean. They run after pointless trinkets.

Of course, grief. Grief for a thing too big to see.

I, too, had nothing to say, and I tried to say it as well as I could. What harm could so small a thing as saying nothing do to anyone?

Something has broken in him. His appetite for human self-regard is dead.

How do you sell emptiness, vulnerability, and nonsuccess?

Fullness in a person cannot permit love because there are no openings, no handles, no give-and-take, and no deep hunger.

I personally describe contemplation as "non-dual consciousness" and find that it is necessary to overcome the "stinking thinking" of most addicts, which tends to be "all-or-nothing thinking."3 We could say that authentic spirituality is invariably a matter of emptying the mind and filling the heart at the same time.

In this high place it is as simple as this, Leave everything you know behind. Step toward the cold surface, say the old prayer of rough love and open both arms. Those who come with empty hands will stare into the lake astonished, there, in the cold light reflecting pure snow, the true shape of your own face. David Whyte, "Tilicho Lake"   Conservatives

At three in the morning Main Street was so quiet that Dallas could hear the street light change from red to green a block away. There was nothing sadder and lonelier in the world, he decided, especially when you were all alone when it happened.

Self-emptiness prepares us for spiritual fullness.

I woke up in the morning and I didn't want anything, didn't do anything, couldn't do it anyway, just lay there listening to the blood rush through me and it never made any sense, anything.

They had this block to themselves. The windows of all the tenements on both sides were marked with the white X of urban renewal; they stood nearly empty, waiting for the wreckers. Within them the cockroaches crawled and the rats chittered, but the humans were away, infesting some other neighborhood.

In all my life— though surrounded by many people— I had not had a single satisfying, sustained relationship with another human being and, not having had any, I did not miss it. I made no demands whatever upon others.

They were paying me to distract Bigger with ping-pong, checkers, swimming, marbles, and baseball in order that he might not roam the streets and harm the valuable white property which adjoined the Black Belt. I am not condemning boys' clubs and ping-pong as such; but these little stopgaps were utterly inadequate to fill up the centuries-long chasm of emptiness which American civilization had created in these Biggers.

Do you know what it means to look at a headless baby sitting in a shovel? It is as if all the languages in the world have been forgotten, as if all the books ever written have been given up to dust. And that you are glad of it. Because such people as we have no right to speak or write or leave any trace for history.

He had been lonely even in his wife's arms, lonely in crowds, lonely at meetings, lonely throwing tennis balls for his dog, lonely playing Operation with his kids. He had been lonely during commuter conversations, lonely during late-night heart-to-hearts with old fraternity brothers. His dad, living alone up in New Hampshire, made Hood lonely. The severe landscapes of November made him lonely.

How can anyone love me when I can't find a single reason to love myself? Do you ever feel like you've given yourself away? Let the world drain away every important thing about you? Why can't anything ever just feel...normal?

I missed him so much I would sometimes turn to tell him something before I forgot he was gone. In spite of all that, and all the emotion boiling around inside me, all I could think of to say was: "You're blue.

My mother was gone. The whole world should be black and cold. Nothing should look beautiful.

Spiritual emptiness is a universal disease.

Without a clear purpose, you will keep changing directions, jobs, relationships, churches, or other externals — hoping each change will settle the confusion or fill the emptiness in your heart. You think, Maybe this time it will be different, but it doesn't solve your real problem — a lack of focus and purpose.

Without a clear purpose, you will keep changing directions, jobs, relationships, churches, or other externals — hoping each change will settle the confusion or fill the emptiness in your heart.

When everything else has gone, love still remains," Dr. Hunter said. "Totally," Reggie said. But what good did it do you? None at all.