Quotes About Emptiness

I like living sparsely. In the main room, there's no furniture - no tables, no chairs, no coffee table - not even a decaffeinated coffee table.

You can become quite blase, and also, I have no sense of home; I don't have roots. I've never had that feeling that someone else is going to take care of me, ever. I don't trust people.

I'd see my daddy about once a month, and I missed him. I would have loved to have had more of him. He was tall, attractive and very quiet, very gentle. He had a wife who I don't think ever really liked me much.

Life seemed suddenly a little empty, for never again could there happen to her something so dangerous, so sublime.

It is a hallow feeling to be in the company of someone with whom we long to have a satisfying personal exchange, only to watch hope dissolve as the time together is drained by superficial chatter or surface distractions.

Those times we refused each other, we seemed to disappear. — Richard Jackson, from "Unable to Refuse," The Heart as Framed: New and Select Poems (Press 53, 2022)

Is there any way we can purely touch the world again, the way a salamander does, breathing through its skin? Can we become the strands of this shrine we weave ourselves into hoping to emerge into a world where—where what? There is no end to desire, which means no end to regret, no end to our need for an ending, so that even the sky refuses our touch, that sky which, at its bluest, is the most empty.

I have only these words that seem as if they climbed up from the bottom of a dry well.

I've come a long way to get nowhere at all, I thought. And I've spent everything I have to get here.

Eight floors of the kind of consumer garbage that L.A. is famous for. Need a Ferrari jacket? Sure. You're a race car driver. Vroom vroom. Need silk designer socks that cost more than neurosurgery? We have that too. Come on down to the Beverly Center for something bright and shiny and leave feeling poorer, puzzled, and dead inside.

It is that to which we cling that drags us to the bottom of the abyss. There is real power at having nothing to lose.

Unfortunately, large cities don't have a monopoly on loneliness. It can be found in small towns as well. Loneliness can be found everywhere there are people.

It's like being dead without the commitment.

The sad, fucking truth was that no matter who you are, you never, ever, get your fill.

there wasn't anything beyond the Flamingo except desert and McCarran Field.

I swear, I end up feeling empty, like you've taken something out of me and I have to search my body for scars.

There is an empty space next to you in the backseat of the station wagon. Make it the shape of everything you need. Now say hello.

I swear, I end up feeling empty, like you've taken something out of me, and I have to search my body for the scars, thinking Did he find that one last tender place to sink his teeth in?

Makes you sad. All your friends are gone. Goodbye Goodbye. No more tears.

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. And I can't eat, can't sleep, can't sit still or fix things

And words, little words, words too small for any hope or promise, not really soothing

I wanted to fall down right there but I knew you wouldn't catch me because you're dead.

We have not been given all the words necessary. We have not been given anything at all.

because you are weak and hollow and it doesn't matter anymore.