Best Empty Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings Page 20

“I'm in awe of the universe, but I don't necessarily believe there's an intelligence or agent behind it. I do have a passion for the visual in religious rituals, though, even though they may be completely empty and bereft of substance. The incense is powerful and provocative, whether Buddhist or Catholic.”

Believe May Universe Passion Religious Powerful Behinds Empty Catholic Agents Buddhist Substance Visuals Awe Ritual Provocative Incense Bereft Religious Rituals

Author:David Bowie

“It is an awfully sad misconception that librarians simply check books in and out. The library is the heart of a school, and without a librarian, it is but an empty shell.”

Heart Book School Empty Library Checks Shells Librarian Misconception Empty Shell

Author:Jarrett J. Krosoczka

“And talking about dark! You think dark is just one color, but it ain't. There're five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don't stay still, it moves and changes from one kind of black to another. Saying something is pitch black is like saying something is green. What kind of green? Green like my bottles? Green like a grasshopper? Green like a cucumber, lettuce, or green like the sky is just before it breaks loose to storm? Well, night black is the same way. May as well be a rainbow.”

Thinking Way Wells Kind May Stills Moving Night Black Dark Talking Break Five Sky Color Six Empty Green Fingers Storm Just One Bottles Rainbow Lettuce Cucumbers Grasshoppers Pitch Black

Author:Toni Morrison

“Very soon he will vanish completely in the wings of his own wordless stanza. [ ] but his stanza is not completely empty [ * ]”

Empty Wings

Author:Mark Z. Danielewski

“In the world I see you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rock feller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Towers. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying stripes of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighways.”

“The whole world appears to me like a huge vacuum, a vast empty space, whence nothing desirable, or at least satisfactory, can possibly be derived; and I long daily to die more and more to it; even though I obtain not that comfort from spiritual things which I earnestly desire.”

World Long Whole Spiritual Desire Dies Space Huge Comfort Empty Whole World Hard Times Desirable Vacuums Empty Space

Book:Memoirs of the Rev. David Brainerd: Missionary to the Indians on the Borders of New-York, New-Jersey, and Pennsylvania: Chiefly Taken from His Own Diary

Source: Memoirs of the Rev. David Brainerd: Missionary to the Indians on the Borders of New-York, New-Jersey, and Pennsylvania: Chiefly Taken from His Own Diary

“The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.”

Philosophy Three Space Comedy Lows Empty Infinite Absurd Pointless Bounty

Book:The Sirens of Titan

Source: The Sirens of Titan

“Nothing makes a man so adventurous as an empty pocket.”

Men Wisdom Empty Pockets Adventurous Empty Pockets

Book:The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

Source: The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

“We are all subject to the fates. But we must all act as if we are not, or die of despair...death will sweep through all the worlds; it will be the triumph of despair, forever. The universes will all become nothing more than interlocking machines, blind and empty of thought, feeling, life...”

Ifs World Feelings Dies Universe Forever Fate Subjects Despair Empty Machines Blind Triumph

Author:Philip Pullman

“As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”

Source: The Hemingway Collection

“There is so much deep contradiction in my soul. Such deep longing for God - so deep that it is painful - a suffering continual - and yet not wanted by God - repulsed - empty - no faith - no love - no zeal. Souls hold no attraction - Heaven means nothing - to me it looks like an empty place - the thought of it means nothing to me and yet this torturing longing for God. Pray for me please that I keep smiling at Him in spite of everything. For I am only His - so He has every right over me. I am perfectly happy to be nobody even to God. . . . Your devoted child in J.C. M. Teresa”

“Gogol is unaccustomed to this sort of talk at mealtimes, to the indulgent ritual of the lingering meal, and the pleasant aftermath of bottles and crumbs and empty glasses that clutter the table.”

Empty Tables Glasses Meals Pleasant Bottles Ritual Clutter Aftermath Lingering Crumbs Gogol

Book:The Namesake: A Novel

Source: The Namesake: A Novel

“Gogol remembers having to do the same thing when he was younger, when his grandparents died...He remembers, back then, being bored by it, annoyed at having to observe a ritual no one else he knew followed, in honor of people he had seen only a few times in his life...Now, sitting together at the kitchen table at six-thirty every evening, his father's chair empty, this meatless meal is the only thing that seems to make sense.”

“Bouillabaisse is only good because cooked by the French, who, if they cared to try, could produce an excellent and nutritious substitute out of cigar stumps and empty matchboxes.”

Ifs Trying Culture Food Produce Empty International Excellent Substitutes Cigar Stumps Matchboxes

Author:Norman Douglas

“People give pain, are callous and insensitive, empty and cruel...but place heals the hurt, soothes the outrage, fills the terrible vacuum that these human beings make.”

People Giving Humans Pain Hurt Human Beings Terrible Empty Heal Vacuums Outrage Insensitive Callous

Author:Eudora Welty

“He says, You have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind about history and everything else but you can't make up an empty mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind. You might be poor , your shoes might be broken , but your mind is a palace.”

Mind Wisdom Might Poor Study Broken Empty Shoes Palaces Empty Mind

Author:Frank McCourt

“Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel. I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio.”

Source: Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the F

“She was gone, and all that was left was the space you'd grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence. For a long time, it remained hollow. Years, maybe. And when at last it was filled again, you knew that the new love you felt for a woman would have been impossible without Alma. If it weren't for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it.”

Ifs Needs Years Long Has Beens Lasts Left Grows Felt Space Gone Impossible Tree Love You Long Time Empty Filled Fence Hollow Empty Space History Of Love

Author:Nicole Krauss

“They cannot scare me with their empty spaces Between stars—on stars where no human race is. I have it in me so much nearer home To scare myself with my own desert places.”

Humans Home Romance Stars My Own Space Race Romantic Empty Desert Human Race Scare Space Between Empty Space Empty Places

Author:Robert Frost

“Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes.”

World Eye Spring Empty Grass Splits Stem Saturday Pits Ants Peaches Milkweed

Author:Toni Morrison

“Live in the Moment", "Empty Your Mind of the Trash" Wisdom is the Use of Knowledge”

Mind Moments Use Empty Live In The Moment Trash Use Of Knowledge

Author:Dan Millman

“After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love.”

Writing Made Stories Empty Sad And Happy

Book:Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition

Source: Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition

“You know the best thing about aeroplanes? Apart from the peanuts in little silver bags, I mean. It's looking out of the windows at the clouds and thinking maybe I could go walking in there. Maybe it's a special place where everything's okay. Sometimes I do go walking in the clouds but it's just cold and wet and empty. But when you look out of a plane it's a special world... and I like it.”

Thinking Knows World Looks Mean Littles Sometimes Special Cold Walking Window Empty Okay Clouds Planes Best Things Bags Silver Wet Peanuts Aeroplanes Special Places Delirium

Author:Neil Gaiman

“Some women wait for themselves around the next corner and call the empty spot peace but the opposite of living is only not living and the stars do not care.”

Care Next Stars Waiting Empty Opposites Corners Spots

Book:The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde

Source: The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde

“Never give us what we really want. Cut the dream into pieces and scatter them like ashes. Dole out the empty promises. Package our aspirations and sell them to us, cheaply made enough to fall apart.”

Want Giving Made Enough Dream Fall Pieces Cutting Promise Empty Sells Aspiration Ashes Falling Apart Packages Empty Promises

Author:Scott Westerfeld

“If you have never wept bitter tears because a wonderful story has come to an end and you must take your leave of the characters with whom you have shared so many adventures, whom you have loved and admired, for whom you have hoped and feared, and without whose company life seems empty and meaningless. If such things have not been part of your own experience, you probably won't understand what Bastian did next.”

Ifs Ends Character Stories Seems Next Company Wonderful Tears Adventure Empty Bitter Meaningless Never Ending Story

Author:Michael Ende

“Or have I passed my time in pouring words like water into empty sieves, rolling a stone up a hill and then down again, trying to prove an argument in the teeth of facts, and looking for causes in the dark, and not finding them?”

Trying Facts Causes Water Dark Prove Findings Argument Stones Empty Teeth Hills My Time Rolling Pouring

Book:Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)

Source: Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)

“Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair. Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species. --speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1962”

Source: A Life in Letters

“I have always felt that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats the last sanctuary of the terminally inept.”

Lasts Felt Violence Empty Threat Refuge Sanctuary Incompetent

Author:Neil Gaiman

“Some people see the glass half full. Others see it half empty. I see a glass that's twice as big as it needs to be.”

People Needs Bigs Half Perspective Empty Optimism Glasses Pessimism Half Full Half Empty Glass Half Full

Author:George Carlin

“I say that is wine," Brett held up her glass. "We ought to toast something. 'Here's to royalty.'" "This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. you don't want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. you lose the taste." Brett's glass was empty.”

Want Loses Emotion Ought Taste Empty Wine Drinking Dear Glasses Royalty Toasts

Book:The Sun Also Rises

Source: The Sun Also Rises

“The light dove, in free flight cutting through the air the resistance of which it feels, could get the idea that it could do even better in airless space. Likewise, Plato abandoned the world of the senses because it posed so many hindrances for the understanding, and dared to go beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of pure understanding.”

World Feels Ideas Light Understanding Space Cutting Air Pure Empty Wings Senses Resistance Flight Abandoned Plato Dove Hindrance Empty Space

Book:Critique of pure reason

Source: Critique of pure reason

“Probably the closest things to perfection are the huge absolutely empty holes that astronomers have recently discovered in space. If there's nothing there, how can anything go wrong?”

Ifs Space Huge Perfection Empty Lovely Holes Closest Astronomers Anything Goes

Author:Richard Brautigan

“Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city's reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.”

Soul Turns Father Cities Wife Sadness Baby Empty Heavy Bottles Dropping Peasants Reservoirs Vodka Cupboards Strangling

Author:P. G. Wodehouse

“Yet nothing can to nothing fall, Nor any place be empty quite; Therefore I think my breast hath all Those pieces still, though they be not unite; And now, as broken glasses show A hundred lesser faces, so My rags of heart can like, wish, and adore, But after one such love, can love no more.”

Thinking Heart Stills Shows Faces Fall Wish Pieces Broken Hundred Empty Glasses Breasts Adore Rags Broken Glass

Book:The Songs and Sonets of John Donne

Source: The Songs and Sonets of John Donne

“You changed the subject." "From what?" "The empty-headed girls who think you're sexy." "You know." "Know what?" "That I only have eyes for you.”

Thinking Knows Eye Girl Subjects Changed Empty Sexy You Changed

Book:A Thousand Splendid Suns

Source: A Thousand Splendid Suns

“Fear not, nor be dismayed at the appearance that is darkness, at the disguise that is evil, at the empty cloak that is death, for you have picked these for your challenges. They are stones on which you choose to whet the keen edge of your spirit.”

Spirit Evil Challenges Darkness Stones Empty Edges Appearance You Choose Disguise Fear Not Cloaks Dismayed

Author:Richard Bach

“The future remains uncertain and so it should, for it is the canvas upon which we paint our desires. Thus always the human condition faces a beautifully empty canvas. We possess only this moment in which to dedicate ourselves continuously to the sacred presence which we share and create.”

Should Humans Moments Faces Desire Journey Share Conditions Future Empty Remains Sacred Paint Present Moment Human Condition Canvas Uncertain Empty Canvas

Book:Children of Dune

Source: Children of Dune

“Man's right to know, to learn, to inquire, to make bona fide errors, to investigate human emotions must, by all means, be safe, if the word "freedom" should ever be more than an empty political slogan.”

Ifs Knows Men Should Humans Mean Political Freedom Emotion Safe Empty Errors Slogans Human Emotions

Book:Selected Writings: An Introduction to Orgonomy

Source: Selected Writings: An Introduction to Orgonomy

“Let Fortune empty her whole quiver on me, I have a soul that, like an ample shield, Can take in all, and verge enough for more; Fate was not mine, nor am I Fate's: Souls know no conquerors.”

Knows Soul Enough Whole Fate Mines Empty Fortune Prosperity Shields Conqueror Verge Quiver

Book:The Dramatick Works of John Dryden, Esq: Don Sebastian, king of Portugal. Amphitryon: or, The two Sosia's. Cleomenes, the Spartan heroe. King Arthur. Love triumphant

Source: The Dramatick Works of John Dryden, Esq: Don Sebastian, king of Portugal. Amphitryon: or, The two Sosia's. Cleomenes, the Spartan heroe. King Arthur. Love triumphant

“All our days are marked with/ unexpected/ affronts--some/ disastrous, others/ less so/ but the process is/ wearing and/ continuous./ Attrition rules./ Most give/ way/ leaving/ empty spaces/ where people should/ be.”

People Way Giving Should Process Space Empty Leaving Unexpected Empty Space Attrition

Author:Charles Bukowski

“He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.”

Heart Said Young Window Empty Starting Squares Truth Of Life Starting Out Cafes All The Pretty Horses

Book:All the Pretty Horses

Source: All the Pretty Horses

“But the fact of it was that I liked it out there, a ruin devoid of human vanities, clean of human illusions, an empty place reclaimed by the weather where a woman plays an organ to stop the wind's whining and an old man plays ball with a dog named Duke. I could tell you that I came back because I had promises to keep, but maybe it was because nobody asked me to stay.”