Quotes About Emptiness

Concentrate on a single flame and feed all your passions into it—fear, hate, anger—until your mind became empty. Become one with the void, Tam said, and you could do anything

It was an odd thing Tam had taught him. Concentrate on a single flame and feed all your passions into it—fear, hate, anger—until your mind became empty. Become one with the void, Tam said, and you could do anything.

Just a sort of unexplained sadness that comes each afternoon when the new day is gone forever and there's nothing ahead but increasing darkness.

That's extremely important to understand. He had given up. Because he'd given up, the surface of life was comfortable for him. He worked reasonably hard, was easy to get along with and, except for an occasional glimpse of inner emptiness shown in some short stories he wrote at the time, his days passed quite usually.

Because he'd given up, the surface of life was comfortable for him. He worked reasonably hard, was easy to get along with and, except for an occasional glimpse of inner emptiness shown in some short stories he wrote at the time, his days passed quite usually.

So we move down the empty road. I don't want to own these prairies, or photograph them, or change them, or even stop or even keep going. We are just moving down the empty road.

An emptiness comes from this combination of over-the-top nonnatural sources of reward and the inevitability of habituation; this is because unnaturally strong explosions of synthetic experience and sensation and pleasure evoke unnaturally strong degrees of habituation.

His life was focused on each single day. For him each night meant a void, a grave, extinction. The capacity to lay oneself down to die at the end of every day, without thinking anything of it, was something he had not yet acquired.

Er wollte nichts mehr von Beförderung wissen, die bei der Truppe nach der Rangliste vorrückte wie eine unsagbar langsame Uhr nichts mehr von den Vormittagen, wo man noch bei aufsteigender Sonne, von oben bis unten beschimpft, vom Exerzierplatz zurückkehrt und mit bestaubten Reitstiefeln das Kasino betritt, um die Leere des Tags, der noch so lang sein wird, um leere Weinflaschen zu vermehren;

But for the present I would lie there and know I didn't have to get up, and feel the holy emptiness and blessed fatigue of a saint after the dark night of the soul. For God and Nothing have a lot in common. You look either one of Them straight in the eye for a second and the immediate effect on the human constitution is the same.

The wind would come down a thousand miles and pound on the house and the sash would rattle and inside him something would be big and coiling slow and clotting till he would hold his breath and the blood would beat in his head with a hollow sound as though his head were a cave as big as the dark outside. He wouldn't have any name for what was big inside him. Maybe there isn't any name.

He claims that the ring is all he has left and if it was stripped away, he'll crumble.

my mom felt more and more alone with no one to turn to.

You see, she concluded miserably, when I can call like that to him across space--I belong to him. He doesn't love me--he never will--but I belong to him.

She had never before minded being alone. Now she dreaded it. When she was alone now she felt so dreadfully alone.

I feel as if something has been torn suddenly out of my life and left a terrible hole. I feel as if I couldn't be I — as if I must have changed into somebody else and couldn't get used to it. It gives me a horrible lonely, dazed, helpless feeling. It's good to see you again — it seems as if you were a sort of anchor for my drifting soul.

it's so dreadful to have nothing to love — life is so empty — and there's nothing worse than emptiness…

Pride is cold company

You see — I've never had any real life. I've just — breathed.

The whitewashed walls were so painfully bare and staring that she thought they must ache over their own bareness.

The moment when a woman realises that she has nothing to live for--neither love, duty, purpose nor hope--holds for her the bitterness of death.

I'm just tired of everything . . . even of the echoes. There is nothing in my life but echoes . . . echoes of lost hopes and dreams and joys. They're beautiful and mocking.

Bets seemed to die afresh every time there was something Pat wanted to share with her and could not.

The old fellow gazed out at the empty tent, painted a soft green by the carbide lamps, and at the tables, now missing their tablecloths, and felt utterly desolate, imagining that this is what his funeral would be like: the tent would become a place of mourning, but there would be no dutiful sons or grandsons in mourning attire kneeling before his coffin, nothing but a few casual acquaintances playing mahjong through the night