Home / Topics / Empty Quotes

Empty Quotes

Browse 2805 quotes about Empty.

Empty Quotes

“I used to stay up all night playing 'Resident Evil 2,' and it wouldn't stop until the sun came up. Then I'd walk outside at dawn's first light, looking at the empty streets of London, and it was like life imitating art. It felt like I'd stepped into an actual zombie apocalypse.”

Firsts Art Light Used Night Evil Felt Walks Sun Streets Empty London Dawn Apocalypse Zombie All Night Residents Imitating Zombie Apocalypse Up All Night Empty Streets Resident Evil

Author:Edgar Wright

“A carnival in daylight is an unfinished beast, anyway. Rain makes it a ghost. The wheezing music from the empty, motionless rides in a soggy, rained-out afternoon midway always hit my chest with a sweet ache. The colored dance of lights in the seeping air flashed the puddles in the sawdust with an oily glamour.”

Light Air Sweet Rain Empty Ghost Beast Chests Afternoon Ache Glamour Daylight Unfinished Puddles Carnivals Midway Sawdust Wheezing

Author:Katherine Dunn

“There is only so much energy available to us in life. Spending it on solving problems is one possible way of living your life, but this may leave you empty - hearted; spending it on what excites you is a lot more fulfilling and fun - and effortless; and usually, the previously experienced problems vanish on their own. We don't have to battle against the darkness when all we need to do is turn on the light.”

Way Life Needs May Problem Light Turns Energy Fun Darkness Battle Empty Available Spending Happy Life Problem Solving Fulfilling Live Your Life Hearted Turn-on Effortless

Author:Andreas Moritz

“Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky.”

Light Dark Silence Sky Dying Balance Empty Flight Hawks

Book:A Wizard of Earthsea

Source: A Wizard of Earthsea

“When they have a choice, people will always gravitate to those rooms which have light on two sides, and leave the rooms which are lit only from one side unused and empty.”

People Two Light Choices Sides Rooms Empty Lit Two Sides

Book:A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction

Source: A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction

“For those who have only to obey, law is what the sovereign commands. For the sovereign, in the throes of deciding what he ought to command, this view of law is singularly empty of light and leading. In the dispersed sovereignty of modern states, and especially in times of rapid social change, law must look to the future as well as to history and precedent, and to what is possible and right as well as to what is actual.”

Wells Looks States Light Law Social Views Modern Ought Empty Command Sovereign Sovereignty Social Change Rapids Precedent Looking To The Future

Author:William Ernest Hocking

“Doth not this Æthereal Medium in passing out of Water, Glass, Crystal, and other compact and dense Bodies into empty Spaces, grow denser and denser by degrees, and by that means refract the Rays of Light not in a point, but by bending them gradually in curve Lines? And doth not the gradual condensation of this Medium extend to some distance from the Bodies, and thereby cause the Inflexions of the Rays of Light, which pass by the edges of dense Bodies, at some distance from the Bodies?”

Source: Opticks:: Or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light

“A bizarrerie of fires, cunabulum of light, it moved with a deft, almost dainty deliberation, phasing into and out of existence like a storm-shot piece of evening; or perhaps the darkness between the flares was more akin to its truest nature swirl of black ashes assembled in prancing cadence to the lowing note of desert wind down the arroyo behind buildings as empty yet filled as the pages of unread books or stillnesses between the notes of a song.”

Source: Frost and Fire

“It cannot be doubted that theistic belief is a comfort and a solace to those who hold it, and that the loss of it is a very painful loss. It cannot be doubted, at least, by many of us in this generation, who either profess it now, or received it in our childhood and have parted from it since with such searching trouble as only cradle-faiths can cause. We have seen the spring sun shine out of an empty heaven, to light up a soulless earth; we have felt with utter loneliness that the Great Companion is dead.”

Source: The Ethics of Belief and Other Essays

“The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space.”

Stills Feelings Light Might Would Be Space Imagine Air Atheism Easier Empty Positive Atheism Resistance Flight Imagine That Dove Empty Space Cleaving

Book:Kant

Source: Kant

“Woe to those who get what they desire. Fulfillment leaves an empty space where your old self used to be, the self that pines and broods and reflects. You furnish a dream house in your imagination, but how startling and final when that dream house is your own address. What is left to you? Surrounded by what you wanted, you feel a sense of amputation. The feelings you were used to abiding with are useless. The conditions you established for your happiness are met. That youthful light-headed feeling whose sharp side is much like hunger is of no more use to you.”

“That's what being shy feels like. Like my skin is too thin, the light too bright. Like the best place I could possibly be is in a tunnel far under the cool, dark earth. Someone asks me a question and I stare at them, empty-faced, my brain jammed up with how hard I'm trying to find something interesting to say. And in the end, all I can do is nod or shrug, because the light of their eyes looking at me, waiting for me, is just too much to take. And then it's over and there's one more person in the world who thinks I'm a complete and total waste of space.”

“But it's never just been the journals that have made the difference, I don't think. It's also the way the students are with one another . . . the way they talk about books and authors and themselves. Not just their problems, but their passions too. The way they form a little society and discuss whatever matters to them. Books light the fire-whether it's a book that's already written, or an empty journal that needs to be filled in.”

Thinking Way Needs Littles Made Book Matter Problem Light Form Passion Differences Fire Written Students Empty Filled Journal Filled In

Author:Meg Wolitzer

“Books light the fire-whether it's a book that's already written, or an empty journal that needs to be filled in.”

Needs Book Light Fire Written Empty Filled Journal Filled In

Book:Belzhar

Source: Belzhar

“At bed-time I went into my room and put out the light. I didn't get undressed. I lay on my bed and looked out of the window at the stars. I read in a book that the stars can take you anywhere. I've never wanted to be an astronaut because of the helmets. If I were up there on the moon, or by the Milky Way, I'd want to feel the stars round my head. I'd want them in my hair the way they are in paintings of the gods. I'd want my whole body to feel the space, the empty space and points of light. That's how dancers must feel, dancers and acrobats, just for a second, that freedom.”

Ifs Way Want Feels Book Whole Body Light Wanted Stars Space Rooms Painting Hair Bed Moon Window Empty Lays Rounds Dancer Astronaut Helmet Empty Space Milky Way Points Of Light Bed Time

Author:Jeanette Winterson

“Even the most solid of things, and the most real, the best-loved and the well-known, are only hand shadows on the wall. Empty space and points of light.”

Wells Real Hands Light Space Known Wall Shadow Empty Well Known Empty Space Points Of Light

Book:Sexing the Cherry

Source: Sexing the Cherry

“Empty your knapsack of all adjectives, adverbs and clauses that slo your stride and weaken your pace. Travel light. Remember the most memorable sentences in the English language are also the shortest: "The King is dead" and "Jesus wept."”

Light Remember Jesus Language Kings Empty Sentences Memorable Pace English Language Stride Adjectives Clauses Most Memorable Adverbs Travel Light

Author:Bill Moyers

“During the late nights, try to walk in the empty streets with an empty mind! Light of wisdom will soon accompany you!”

Trying Mind Light Night Walks Streets Late Empty Accompany Late Night Empty Mind Empty Streets Accompany You

Author:Mehmet Murat Ildan

“The poison was brewed in these West lands but it has spat itself everywhere by now. However far you went you would find the machines, the crowded cities, the empty thrones, the false writings, the barren beds: men maddened with false promises and soured with true miseries, worshipping the iron works of their own hands, cut off from Earth their Mother and from the Father in Heaven. You might go East so far the East became West and you returned to Britain across the great Ocean, but even so you would not have come out anywhere into the light. The shadow of one dark wing is over all Tellus.”

Source: That Hideous Strength

“God is Someone who creates something out of nothing. He takes emptiness and creates wholeness, He takes darkness and speaks light. Because of this, we can come to God empty and weak knowing that He takes us and with His power makes something out of nothing.”

Light Speak Darkness Knowing Empty Weak Emptiness Wholeness

Author:Vicky Beeching

“It is like a piece of my soul had been lost, empty, and it is now filled with the light of a million stars.”

Life Soul Light Lost Stars Millions Pieces Empty Filled My Soul Across The Universe

Book:Across the Universe

Source: Across the Universe

“Yes, now I understood for the first time that my soul was not so poor and empty as it had seemed to me, and that it had been only the sun that was lacking to open all its germs, and buds to the light.”

Firsts Soul Light Poor Sun Understood First Time Empty My Soul Lacking Bud Germs

Book:Memories

Source: Memories

“Always keep your mind as bright and clear as the vast sky, the great ocean, and the highest peak, empty of all thoughts. Always keep your body filled with light and heat. Fill yourself with the power of wisdom and enlightenment.”

Mind Body Light Sports Clear Sky Ocean Highest Enlightenment Empty Filled Your Body Heat Enlightened Enlightenment And Love

Author:Morihei Ueshiba

“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

“I will be thin and pure like a glass cup. Empty. Pure as light. Music. I move my hands over my body - my shoulders, my collarbone, my rib cage, my hip bones like part of an animal skull, my small thighs. In the mirror my face is pale and my eyes look bruised. My hair is pale and thin and the light comes through. I could be a lot younger than seventeen. I could be a child still, untouched.”

Looks Children Stills Body Hands Light Eye Faces Moving Animal Hair Pure Empty Mirrors Glasses Bones Shoulders Cups Hips Pale Cages Skulls Thighs Seventeen Ribs Bruised Rib Cage

Book:The Hanged Man

Source: The Hanged Man

“The first lights of the evening were springing into pale existence. The Ferris wheel, pricked out now in lights, revolved leisurely through the dusk; a few empty cars of the roller coaster rattled overhead.”

Firsts Light Existence Car Empty Evening Wheels Pale Dusk Roller Coaster Coasters Overhead Ferris Wheels

Book:The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works

Source: The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works

“He thought back on his family with deep emotion and love. His conviction that he would have to disappear was, if possible, even firmer than his sister's. He remained in this state of empty and peaceful reflection until the tower clock struck three in the morning. He still saw that outside the window everything was beginning to grow light. Then, without his consent, his head sank down to the floor, and from his nostrils streamed his last weak breath.”

Ifs Stills States Light Lasts Three Grows Emotion Morning Saws Reflection Window Empty Weak And Love Breaths Conviction Disappear Peaceful Clock Towers Consent Deep Emotions

Book:The Metamorphosis

Source: The Metamorphosis

“I turn and I look back across the lake. The mist is gone and the ice diminished, the drip of the icicles quick and heavy. The sun is up and the sky is blue empty blue light blue clear blue. I would drink the sky if I could drink it, drink it and celebrate it and let it fill me and become me. I am getting better. Empty and clear and light and blue. I am getting better.”

Ifs Looks Light Turns Sun Gone Clear Sky Drink Empty Blue Heavy Ice Celebrate Get Better If I Could Lakes Mist Icicles Light Blue

Book:A Million Little Pieces

Source: A Million Little Pieces

“I sat on the bed. I looked at the Rorschach blot. I tried to make it look like a spreading tree, shadows pooled beneath it, but it didn't. It looked more like a dead cat I once found, the fat, glistening grubs writhing blindly, squirming over each other, frantically tunneling away from the light. But even that isn't the real horror. The horror is this: in the end, it is simply a picture of empty meaningless blackness.”

Looks Real Ends Light Found Tree Horror Bed Shadow Cat Empty Fats Sat Meaningless Blackness Rorschach

Author:Alan Moore

“The library smells like old books — a thousand leather doorways into other worlds. I hear silence, like the mind of God. I feel a presence in the empty chair beside me. The librarian watches me suspiciously. But the library is a sacred place, and I sit with the patron saint of readers. Pulsing goddess light moves through me for one moment like a glimpse of eternity instantly forgotten. She is gone. I smell mold, I hear the clock ticking, I see an empty chair. Ask me now and I'll say this is just a place where you can't play music or eat. She's gone. The library sucks.”

“I recall an August afternoon in Chicago in 1973 when I took my daughter, then seven, to see what Georgia O’Keeffe had done with where she had been. One of the vast O’Keeffe ‘Sky Above Clouds’ canvases floated over the back stairs in the Chicago Art Institute that day, dominating what seemed to be several stories of empty light, and my daughter looked at it once, ran to the landing, and kept on looking. "Who drew it," she whispered after a while. I told her. "I need to talk to her," she said finally.”

Source: The White Album

“Only Thee That I want thee, only thee---let my heart repeat without end. All desires that distract me, day and night, are false and empty to the core. As the night keeps hidden in its gloom the petition for light, even thus in the depth of my unconsciousness rings the cry ---`I want thee, only thee'. As the storm still seeks its end in peace when it strikes against peace with all its might, even thus my rebellion strikes against thy love and still its cry is ---`I want thee, only thee'.”

Want Heart Stills Ends Light Might Desire Night Cry My Heart Empty Depth Storm Strikes Core Rings Thee Repeats Rebellion Day And Night Gloom Petitions Unconsciousness

Book:Gitanjali

Source: Gitanjali

“Listening (had there been any one to listen) from the upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason, and mounted one on top of another, and lunged and plunged in the darkness or the daylight (for night and day, month and year ran shapelessly together) in idiot games, until it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself.”

Source: Selected Works of Virginia Woolf

“Courage cannot be left like bones in a bag. It must be brought out and shown the light again and again, growing stronger each time. If you think it will keep for the times you need it, you are wrong. It is like any other part of your strength. If you ignore it, the bag will be empty when you need it most.”

Ifs Thinking Needs Light Left Growing Empty Stronger Bones Bags Again And Again Growing Stronger

Book:Conqueror: The Complete 5-Book Collection

Source: Conqueror: The Complete 5-Book Collection

“Bog-lights, vapors of mysticism, psychic overtones, soul orgies, wailings among the shadows, weird gnosticisms, veils and tissues of words, gibbering subjectivisms, gropings and maunderings, ontological fantasies ... this is the stuff, the phantasms of hope, that fills your book shelves. Look at them, all the sad wraiths of sad mad men and passionate rebels — your Schopenhauers, your Strindbergs, your Tolstois and Nietzsches. Come. Your glass is empty. Fill and forget.”

Book Light Stuff Forget Fantasy Empty Glasses Mysticism Shelves Psychics Veils Tissues Hallucinations Gnosticism Vapor Bogs Subjectivism

Author:Jack London

“It is unearned love--the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It's the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.”

Thinking Way Ideas Helping Light Left Grace Empty Grateful Charm Desperate Isolated Charming Embarrassed Electricity Breeze Juice Bright Ideas Isolated Places

Author:Anne Lamott

“Problem is, you can’t accept that his relationship had a real short shelf life. You’re like a dog at the dump, baby – you’re just lickin’ at the empty tin can, trying to get more nutrition out of it. And if you’re not careful, that can’s gonna get stuck on your snout forever and make your life miserable. So drop it.” “But I love him.” “So love him.” “But I miss him.” “So miss him. Send him some love and light every time you think about him, then drop it.”

Source: Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything

“From this distance, in the dimness, the model looked surreal, made up of parts filled with buildings, bordered by long stretches of empty space. It reminded me of the way cities and towns look when you are flying at night. You can't make out much. But the places where people have come together, and stayed, are collections of tiny lights, breaking up the darkness.”

Source: What Happened to Goodbye

“I walked over, my eyes scanning Luna Blu, my house, and Dave's. But it was the building behind them, that empty hotel, that had the tiniest light, provided by one word, written in fluorescent paint. Maybe it wasn't what was once there, in real life. But in this one, it said it all: STAY.”

Said Real Light Eye House Behinds Written Building Empty Paint Real Life Hotel One Word Dave Scanning

Book:What Happened to Goodbye

Source: What Happened to Goodbye

“There is a certain unique and strange delight about walking down an empty street alone. There is an off-focus light cast by the moon, and the streetlights are part of the spotlight apparatus on a bare stage set up for you to walk through. You get a feeling of being listened to, so you talk aloud, softly, to see how it sounds.”

Feelings Light Certain Sound Walks Focus Streets Stage Strange Walking Moon Unique Empty Casts Delight Spotlight Empty Streets

Book:The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present and future. The division does not exist. What does this say about time? Matter, that thing the most solid and the well-known, which you are holding in your hands and which makes up your body, is now known to be mostly empty space. Empty space and points of light. What does this say about the reality of the world?”

Source: Sexing the Cherry

“Dawn's faint breath breathes with your mouth at the ends of empty streets. Gray light your eyes, sweet drops of dawn on dark hills. Your steps and breath like the wind of dawn smother houses. The city shudders, Stones exhale— you are life, an awakening. Star lost in the light of dawn, trill of the breeze, warmth, breath— the night is done. You are light and morning.”

Ends Done Light Eye Night House Lost Stars Dark Cities Steps Morning Streets Sweet Wind Mouths Stones Empty Breaths Breathe Awakening Hills Dawn Gray Warmth Breeze Empty Streets Trill

Author:Cesare Pavese

“I can't deceive myself out of the bare stark realization that no matter how enthusiastic you are, no matter how sure that character is fate, nothing is real, past or future, when you are alone in your room with the clock ticking loudly into the false cheerful brilliance of the electric light. And if you have no past or future which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide.”

“Darken your room, shut the door, empty your mind. Yet you are still in great company - the Numen and your Genius with all their media, and your host of elementals and ghosts of your dead loves — are there! They need no light by which to see, no words to speak, no motive to enact except through your own purely formed desire.”

Needs Mind Stills Light Desire Speak Rooms Company Doors Media Genius Empty Ghost Motive Host Elementals Your Room Great Company

Author:Austin Osman Spare

“The life I walk binds my hands it makes me take things that I don’t understand I walk this dark world unknowing of what they hold true, forgetting the me I once knew, until you. The life I walk eternally was all I knew nothing more held me here to this earth until you. I feel the pain of every heart I take I feel the desire to replace all that I have grown to hate Darkness holds me close but the light still draws my empty soul The emptiness where I used pain to fill the hole no longer controls me, no longer calls me because of you.”

World Feels Heart Stills Soul Hands Light Earth Pain Used Desire Hate Dark Walks Forget Darkness Draws Empty Holes Emptiness Call Me Hold Me Because Of You Unknowing Dark World Empty Souls

Author:Abbi Glines

“I flicked on the light beside my bed, waiting for my breathing to slow, veins full of adrenaline from the realistic dream. A new dream, but in essence so much the same as the many others that had plagued me in the past months. No, not a dream. Surely a memory. I could still feel the heat of Jared's lips on mine. My hands reached out without my permission, searching across the rumpled sheets, looking for something they didn't find. My heart ached when they gave up, falling to the bed limp and empty.”

Feels Heart Stills Dream Hands Light Past Fall Waiting Memories Mines Months My Heart Bed Empty Essence Lips Breathing Heat Realistic Permission Sheets Veins Gave Up Adrenaline

Author:Stephenie Meyer

“Whiteness is the color of death, you know, not black. Wetness is life, the breeder and shaper of life. In the beginning the sun was black. So all light was absorbed before it had a chance to return. And our dreams, then, were empty.”

Knows Dream Light Black Chance Sun Color Return Empty Our Dreams Whiteness Breeders Wetness

Author:Jim Carroll

“But I was not made for the great light that devours, a dim lamp was all I had been given, and patience without end, to shine it on the empty shadows.”

Made Ends Light Given Shadow Empty Shining Lamps

Book:Molloy

Source: Molloy

“Thus weary of the world, away she hies, And yokes her silver doves; by whose swift aid Their mistress mounted through the empty skies In her light chariot quickly is convey'd; Holding their course to Paphos, where their queen Means to immure herself and not be seen.”

World Mean Light Courses Sky Empty Aids Queens Silver Weary Mistress Dove Yoke Chariots

Book:The Dramatic Works of William Shakspeare

Source: The Dramatic Works of William Shakspeare

“One thing I knew about the novelist’s task: when in doubt, write; when empty, write; when afraid, write. Nothing is more impenetrable than the blank page. The blank page is the void, the absence of sense and feeling, the white light of literary death.”

Writing Feelings Light White Doubt One Thing Pages Tasks Empty Absence Novelists Void Blank When In Doubt Blank Pages White Light

Author:Philip Sington