Emptiness proverbs

Page 4

◆ That's for the best. Otherwise they might realize they're in prison. It can't be helped. You women are used to harems and prisons. A person can spend his whole life between four walls. If he doesn't think or feel that he's a prisoner, then he's not a prisoner. But then there are people for whom the whole planet is a prison, who see the infinite expanse of the universe, the millions of stars and galaxies that remain forever inaccessible to them. And that awareness makes them the greatest prisoners of time and space.

- Vladimir Bartol98

◆ The objects I chose were designed to hold something, but I didn't fill them up. They remained empty. They were little symbolic shrines to thirst.

- Margaret Atwood98

◆ I think that's what finally stopped me. I slid right to the edge. My legs were hanging over. And I could feel it too. I don't know how. There was no wind, no sound, no change of temperature. There was just this terrible emptiness reaching up for me.

- Mark Z. Danielewski98

◆ We hear only our own voices, still echoes returning to our emptiness.

- Dejan Stojanovic98

◆ I wonder now whether inner coldness and desolation may not be the pre-condition for making the world believe, by a kind of fraudulent showmanship, that one's own wretched heart is still aglow.

- W.G. Sebald98

◆ If emptiness is empty, how can something be borne or awaken from it?

- Dejan Stojanovic98

◆ What had been quiet and restful was now silent and empty.

- Frederick Barthelme98

◆ Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.

- Thomas Pynchon98

◆ But what we are given is taken as well, so that we know God's glory comes to us from His will alone.

- Alice Hoffman98

◆ All infants and children require and deserve comfort in order to develop properly. Soft cooing voices, gentle touch, smiles, cleanliness, and wholesome food all contribute to the growing body/mind. And when these basic conditions are absent in childhood, our need for comfort in adulthood can be so profound that it becomes pathological, driving us to seek mothering from anyone who will have us, to use others to fill our emptiness with sex or love, and to risk becoming addicted to a perceived source of comfort.

- Alexandra Katehakis98

◆ The dizziness in the face of les espaces infinis--only overcome if we dare to gaze into them without any protection. And accept them as the reality before which we must justify our existence. For this is the truth we must reach to live, that everything is and we just in it.

- Dag Hammarskj?ld98

◆ I step back further, until I feel cold tiles against my back. It is then I get the glimmer that I associate with memory. As my mind tries to settle on it, it flutters away, like ashes caught in a breeze, and I realize that in my life there is a then, a before, though before what I cannot say, and there is a now, and there is nothing between the two but a long, silent emptiness that has led me here, to me and him, in this house.

- S.J. Watson98

◆ The vastness of the desert frightened her. Everything looked too far away, even the couldless sky. There was nowhere you could hide in such emptiness.

- James Carlos Blake98

◆ It is the empty seats that listen most raptly.

- James Richardson98

◆ Freedom from likes and dislikes, the sudden sense of identification, the spirit of comedy.

- John Cage98