Emptiness quotations

Page 3

◆ Part of the problem with the word 'disabilities' is that it immediately suggests an inability to see or hear or walk or do other things that many of us take for granted. But what of people who can't feel? Or talk about their feelings? Or manage their feelings in constructive ways? What of people who aren't able to form close and strong relationships? And people who cannot find fulfillment in their lives, or those who have lost hope, who live in disappointment and bitterness and find in life no joy, no love? These, it seems to me, are the real disabilities.

- Fred Rogers99

◆ At first I felt dizzy - not with the kind of dizziness that makes the body reel but the kind that's like a dead emptiness in the brain, an instinctive awareness of the void.

- Fernando Pessoa98

◆ If emptiness is endless, then everything rests in emptiness.

- Dejan Stojanovic98

◆ Emptiness is like air. It floats around unseen but you know it's there.

- PureDragonWolf98

◆ I am deep in my willed habits. From the outside, I suppose I look like an unoccupied house with one unconvincing night-light left on. Any burglar could look through my curtains and conclude I am empty. But he would be mistaken. Under that one light unstirred by movement or shadows there is a man at work, and as long as I am at work I am not a candidate for Menlo Park, or that terminal facility they cynically call a convalescent hospital, or a pine box. My habits and the unchanging season sustain me. Evil is what questions and disrupts.

- Wallace Stegner98

◆ That thromping thing in my chest can hardly be called a heart. It has been wrung out and deformed into something merely functional. Nothing can revive it.

- Anna Jae98

◆ Left alone, I am overtaken by the northern void-no wind, no cloud, no track, no bird, only the crystal crescents between peaks, the ringing monuments of rock that, freed from the talons of ice and snow, thrust an implacable being into the blue. In the early light, the rock shadows on the snow are sharp; in the tension between light and dark is the power of the universe. This stillness to which all returns, this is reality, and soul and sanity have no more meaning than a gust of snow; such transience and insignificance are exalting, terrifying, all at once…Snow mountains, more than sea or sky, serve as a mirror to one's own true being, utterly still, utterly clear, a void, an Emptiness without life or sound that carries in Itself all life, all sound.

- Peter Matthiessen98

◆ To die is more important than trying to be alive. When we try to be alive, we have trouble. Rather than trying to be alive or active, if we can be calm and die or fade away into emptiness, then naturally we will be all right.

- Shunryu Suzuki98

◆ Quand il mangeait des babas ou des éclairs, il se sentait coupable jusqu'à l'ame, à cause de la guerre, à cause des vendeuses dont les maris ou les amants se trouvaient sans doute quelque part, entre la mer du Nord et les Vosges. Mais il comprenait que Madeleine avait besoin de cette nourriture, justement pour tenir en échec ce vide, ce néant, cette nuit où elle était toujours sur le point de sombrer.

- Boileau-Narcejac98

◆ Only your surface feels empty and longing; in your depths there is a firm weight of fullness.

- Bryant McGill98

◆ Some say crying purges. I say it drains. There's a difference. One takes the bad things from you to help close a space. The other opens you and leaves you empty

- Dan Skinner98

◆ Without your pain you are nothing but a spiritual embryo.

- Bryant McGill98

◆ Want is an empty void — your real value is full and abundant.

- Bryant McGill98

◆ Did you play by the rules and work hard but feel empty and unfulfilled? It's because you were lied to.

- Bryant McGill98

◆ I felt empty, too, and strangely heavy, like the planet was spinning too fast, heating up gravity, pulling me toward the floor.

- Ransom Riggs98