Empty And Filled Quotes & Sayings

When life is empty, with respect to the past, and aimless, with respect to the future, the vacuum is filled by the present - normally reduced to a hairline, a split second in which there is no time for anything to happen. — Alan W. Watts

I like that the Mall serves as our national Tuppaware, reliable and empty, waiting to be filled with potluck whatever. — Sarah Vowell

We all shared a feeling of hunger, empty bellies, bottomless appetites that when filled, kept us up at night. When we spoke we shouted, all our voices together, a chorus of pleas, and rooftop dreams, voices carrying from building to building, no skyscrapers to block them, we all shared a voice, devouring the ears that accepted it, that opened to us. We would be heard. We would dizzily take in those sunrise nights and talk about what it would be like to be heard. — Roof Alexander

Over time events trickle out of the minds of forgetful, thoughtless people, and so, since they retain and conserve nothing, the empty space within them, that should be filled with good things, is filled instead with hopes, so that they neglect the present and look to the future, despite the fact that fortune may yet foil the future, whereas the present cannot be taken away. — Plutarch

She played with her eyes closed. He closed his own eyes, joining her in the darkness. She had said the song depicted a battle, but nothing of the sort came to mind, no lofty images of horses and banners waving or battalions clashing over hills. Only darkness and a pure sound that filled him, creeping into spaces he hadn't known were empty. — Jeannie Lin

There's a vacancy, won't you come to me And fill my empty spaces I'm a motel man in a promised land That's filled with empty faces So won't you bring your sorrows bring your dreams, It's a place for you to be There's no more tomorrow or that's how it seems Won't you come to me? I've got a vacancy — Harry Chapin

No empty words and gestures, but hands filled with hands, hands pointing the way, hands tracing new lines as age slowly creases its course from the corners of my eyes. — Nolan Liebert

I sleep for an entire day. And when I wake up I'm a new person. I'm empty. I've cried out everything I had in me. I'm an empty shell waiting to be filled with what comes next. Or I'm just being a total drama queen. I'm not empty. I'm still a person. I cried over a bad thing that happened in my life, but I probably shouldn't have. Compared to Mom's crisis, mine was small. Compared to a thousand other girls' around the world, mine is insignificant. It wasn't bad. Not compared to everyone else. It was just a couple seconds. It wasn't years. It wasn't months, like Mom. It wasn't a family member. Wasn't someone I see anymore. It didn't even hurt. There was no blood. It wasn't bad. Not compared to others'. So I should stop crying. — Sara Wolf

Immeasurable voids and endless questions are often created when a father deliberately abandons his child. Far too often, those empty spaces are filled by opportunists who see that vulnerability as something to exploit. — Steve Pemberton

Sarah Palin is an empty vessel ready to be filled by ideology that she doesn't even understand, and that is really scary. Nothing is more frightening than an empty vessel in power. — Chris Matthews

I believe deeply that God does his best work in our lives during times of great heartbreak and loss, and I believe that much of that rich work is done by the hands of people who love us, who dive into the wreckage with us and show us who God is, over and over and over. There are years when the Christmas spirit is hard to come by, and it's in those seasons when I'm so thankful for Advent. Consider it a less flashy but still very beautiful way of being present to this season. Give up for a while your false and failing attempts at merriment, and thank God for thin places, and for Advent, for a season that understands longing and loneliness and long nights. Let yourself fall open to Advent, to anticipation, to the belief that what is empty will be filled, what is broken will be repaired, and what is lost can always be found, no matter how many times it's been lost. — Shauna Niequist

Maybe she had it wrong all this time and her empty heart could never be filled by his ingenious broken spirit. Maybe this yearning had nothing to do with him, and everything to do with her. — Coco J. Ginger

They say it's the woman's prerogative to change her mind. But that's wrong. Guys are the one who get to say, "You know what? I don't want to be with you after all." They get to say it after they've sucked all the sweetness out of you, just like those cheap, liquid filled wax candy things we used to get for Halloween. They leave you dried up, empty piece of wax, and head off to find somebody else who still has some sweetness inside. — Holly Schindler

It is hardest to kill the man who has the most to live for.' He took a pretend shot. 'The empty, the soulless, the hate-filled enemies drop like flies. Those who love, and love hard, are the ones left standing. — Catherine Doyle

I was going back and reading Marconi's last book again, and there's this part that
always gets me. He points out that the amount of the universe a human can experience is
statistically, like, zero percent. You've got this huge universe, trillions of trillions of miles of empty
space between galaxies, and all a human can perceive is a little tunnel a few feet wide and a few feet
long in front of our eyes. So he says we don't really live in the universe at all, we live inside our
brains. All we can see is like a blurry little pinhole in a blindfold, and the rest is filled in by our
imagination. So whatever we think of the world, whether you think the world is cruel or good or
cold or hot or wet or dry or big or small, that comes entirely from inside your head and nowhere
else. — David Wong

Aiden had filled a part of my heart that I hadn't known was empty. And for that I'd be forever grateful. Beneath the pain was the reality of the end of whatever it was we'd shared. I missed him, and his absence was profound. He was everywhere, yet he was nowhere at all. — Lilly Wilde

What, the glass is half-full instead of half-empty? Bullshit. What they don't tell you is that regardless of how full the glass is, it's filled with acid, and you'll burn your face off. — T.J. Klune

He stood breathing, and the more he breathed the land in, the more he was filled up with all the details of the land. He was not empty. There was more than enough here to fill him. There would always be more than enough. — Ray Bradbury

Perhaps there is to be found in Pastrana the key to something which happens in Spain more frequently than is necessary. Past splendor overwhelms and in the end exhausts the people's will; and without force of will, as can be seen in so many cases, by being exclusively occupied with the contemplation of the glories of the past, they leave current problems unsolved. When the belly is empty and the mind filled with golden memories, the golden memories continually retreat and at last, though no one goes so far as to admit it, there is even doubt whether they ever existed and there is nothing left of them but a benevolent and useless cultural residue. — Camilo Jose Cela

Someone smashed a flutterfler and without even thinking she touched her Stone and used Wyrd to piece its broken body back together. She filled its empty vessels with dreams and it became the stuff it used for blood. It brushed her cheek with its wings, then flew off
dancing in the hot air. — Robert Fanney

so we must not come to worship God empty-hearted; our souls must be filled with grace, with pious and devout affections, holy desires towards him, and dedications of ourselves to him, for with such sacrifices God is well-pleased. — Matthew Henry

Leo gestured to the empty core. "The syncopator goes here. It's a multi-access gyro-valve to regulate flow. The dozen glass tubes on the outside? Those are filled with powerful, dangerous stuff. That glowing red one is Lemnos fire from my dad's forges. This murky stuff here? That's water from the River Styx. The stuff in the tubes is going to power the ship, right? Like radioactive rods in a nuclear reactor. But the mix ratio has to be controlled, and the timer is already operational."
Leo tapped the digital clock, which now read 65:15. "That means without the syncopator, this stuff is all going to vent into the chamber at the same time, in sixty-five minutes. At that point, we'll get a very nasty reaction."
Jason and Piper stared at him. Leo wondered if he'd been speaking English. Sometimes when he was agitated he slipped into Spanish, like his mom used to do in her workshop. But he was pretty sure he'd used English. — Rick Riordan

Get yourself empty in the Eastern sense. Not in the Western sense. In the Western sense when we feel empty we feel lonely, miserable, but in the Eastern sense - "I'm so empty, because I'm filled with everything, and I'm connected to everything." It's very energizing. You want that kind of emptiness, whatever you have to do to get yourself quiet. — Sandra Cisneros

I just thought I was empty and now I'm being filled ... and I just wanted to keep being filled. — Laura Hillenbrand

Sonnet XXV
Before I loved you, love, nothing was my own:
I wavered through the streets, among
Objects:
Nothing mattered or had a name:
The world was made of air, which waited.
I knew rooms full of ashes,
Tunnels where the moon lived,
Rough warehouses that growled 'get lost',
Questions that insisted in the sand.
Everything was empty, dead, mute,
Fallen abandoned, and decayed:
Inconceivably alien, it all
Belonged to someone else - to no one:
Till your beauty and your poverty
Filled the autumn plentiful with gifts. — Pablo Neruda

Several minutes later, when I passed among the guests to fill their empty cups with wine, I found him standing at my shoulder. "You'll wound my pride," he warned me softly, "ignoring me so." I flicked him a look that was only half-impatient. "I must not speak with you, by my uncle's own instruction." "And when have you obeyed instructions?" He held out his own cup to be filled, his mouth curved in amusement. "Besides, your uncle is engaged at present, with a most serious gentleman. If he should look this way, I've only to duck my head." "You are impossible, my lord." "Ay. And your good humor is lacking, madam. What is it that has so offended you? — Susanna Kearsley

sight. In his essay On The Sublime, Edmund Burke observes, "Represent the most sublime and affecting tragedy we have...and when you have collected your audience, just at the moment when their minds are filled with expectation, let it be reported that a criminal is on the point of being executed in the adjoining square..." And in a moment, the theater will be empty. In these bloody rituals of execution and repression, the leader becomes the ancient God-King stepping forward to save his people, a promise as dangerous as it is seductive. If there is one lesson we can take away from the extravagant lives of our tyrants it is the fragility of our democratic society which, after all, is the exception, not the norm, in that dark, violent story known as human history. — Daniel Myerson

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

I kissed him and let that emotion consume me, to settle the pain that had risen inside my soul - to heal the pain I knew he felt. I let it consume and override the doubt that all we really needed was one another. That this empty hole could be filled with the love we felt for one another. — Cassandra Giovanni

A cup is useful only when it is empty; and a mind that is filled with beliefs, with dogmas, with assertions, with quotations is really an uncreative mind. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

In the absence of the great majority of guests, all manner of rumors came into the Shalimar Bagh, hooded and cloaked to shield themselves against the elements, and filled the empty places around the dastarkhans: cheap rumors from the gutter as well as fancy rumors claiming aristocratic parentage - an entire social hierarchy of rumor lounged against the bolsters, created by the mystery that enveloped everything like the blizzard. The rumors were veiled, shadowy, unclear, argumentative, often malicious. They seemed like a new species of living thing, and evolved according to the laws laid down by Darwin, mutating randomly and being subjected to the amoral winnowing processes of natural selection. The — Salman Rushdie

A woman who is starved for her real soul-life may look 'cleaned up and combed' on the outside, but on the inside she is filled with dozens of pleading hands and empty mouths. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

She was his heart, his other half. She filled all the empty places in his soul that he had desperately tried to paper over with pirate escapades and merry women.
-The Ugly Duchess — Eloisa James

One must face the fact that all the talk about His
love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda,
but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of
Himself - creatures, whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has
absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food;
(2) He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are
empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has
drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct. — C.S. Lewis

Whenever someone says the word "month" to me, I call up an empty square filled with other empty squares, days, and hours and minutes, bricks on bricks spiraling inward, pinwheel and diamond, and herringbone patterns marching smaller and smaller to some vanishing point. — Patricia Lockwood

Be surprised at nothing. Let peace and stillness flood through you and envelop you completely in its cloak. Put on the whole armor of love - and yet feel, feel very deeply. Let tears flow, washing away impurities until you feel clean within and clean without. Become like an empty vessel ready to be filled with life's nectar. — Eileen Caddy

The idea that the millionaire finds nothing but a sad, empty place at the top of this society; the idea that the rich do not know what to do with their
money; the idea that the successful become filled up with futility, and that
those born successful are poor and little as well as rich - the idea, in short,
of the disconsolateness of the rich - is, in the main, merely a way by which
those who are not rich reconcile themselves to the fact. Wealth in America is
directly gratifying and directly leads to many further gratifications. To be
truly rich is to possess the means of realizing in big ways one's little whims
and fantasies and sicknesses ... — C. Wright Mills

Sometimes she'd go a whole day without thinking of him or missing him. Why not? She had quite a full life, and really, he'd often been hard to deal with and hard to live with. A project, the Yankee oldtimers like her very own Dad might have said. And then sometimes a day would come, a gray one (or a sunny one) when she missed him so fiercely she felt empty, not a woman at all anymore but just a dead tree filled with cold November blow. She felt like that now, felt like hollering his name and hollering him home, and her heart turned sick with the thought of the years ahead and she wondered what good love was if it came to this, to even ten seconds of feeling like this. — Stephen King

I know of no trunk full of old heirlooms, no felt hats or army uniforms. There are no tarnished medals or gold watches. I've stopped dreaming of discovering the old shoe box filled with the history of our family, the documents and letters that recorded our family's arrival and the historical milestones as my grandfathers left their mark on a place. There is no journal or diary. I do not know if they knew how to read or write. I could easily dismiss their existence. Their lives seem empty and still, void of emotion. I cannot tell if they wear scars. I only know of my grandfathers as broken old men. — David Mas Masumoto

He had been alone in the world and empty for so long. But she filled him full, and so he believed everything that had been taken out of him might have been for a purpose. To clear space for something better. — Charles Frazier

Grab your cock, McKay," Trav rasped. "Squeeze it, beat it, jerk it, fucking grab it and get off!" Mackey was as rough with himself as Trav was with him, and a new smacking sound filled the room. "Fuckin' Trav!" Time stopped and Mackey's entire body bowed painfully off the bed. His legs shot out straight and his toes curled, and Trav spread his thighs with force and shoved inside one more time. The room turned black and every muscle from his cock to his taint to his own empty asshole clenched painfully as he poured himself into Mackey Sanders, and Mackey's groan could probably be heard across the hall. Trav — Anonymous

It is an empty room, that afterwards, a soledad, and it sits there at the center of a person's life and waits to be filled. — Daisy Hernandez

And that's how it was with Garrett. Because he understood me, the me I wanted so desperately to be. Think about your best friend - how you tell them everything, how they're the person who knows you best, all your deepest fears and insecurities. They're the one you call when something amazing happens or when everything falls apart and you need someone to come over and watch movies and tell you that everything's going to be OK. It's not like family, who are obligated to love you and even then sometimes fail to be everything they're supposed to be. Your true friend has chosen you, and you them, and that's a different kind of bond.
That's Garrett to me. I'm used to talking to him all the time, about the most meaningless stuff. To have him gone feels like a loss, an absence haunting me every day. Without him, there's just the empty space that used to be filled with laughter and friendship and comfort.
Can you really blame me for finding it so hard to let go? — Abby McDonald

But Jaye knew empty things were never truly empty. They were merely filled with the dark. And the dark moved. — Lynn Kelling

Joy spread and filled all the empty corners of my being. "I love you, too. — Deanna Chase

EVERY TIME I see a dog in a movie, I think the same thing: I want that dog. I see Skip or Lucy or Shiloh and for a moment I can't even think about the movie's plot. I can only think about the dog. I want to hold it, pet it, take it for walks, and tell it what a good dog it is. I want to love it, and I want it to love me. I have an empty space inside myself that can only be filled by a dog. — Roger Ebert

The heart of a man can never be satisfied with the things of this world. It is always empty, and hungry, and thirsty, and dissatisfied, till it comes to Christ. It is only they who hear Christ's voice, and follow Him, and feed on Him by faith, who are 'filled.'. — J.C. Ryle

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. — Sarah Dessen

Sad truth is. . . we all end up alone on some death bed. Yeah? No way to take anybody else's place and no way we can be lying on the same one."

I was at the edge of the white-wed cloth. My shoes filled with concrete, as did my head, looking at the empty shell of what was once a woman full of wonder.

"Any way to make someone feel not so alone?" she asked.

"The only thing anyone can ever do is help someone feel a little less lonely before they get there."

"How does someone do that?"

"Memories. Help create memories. Better ones. Ones to replace the old. — S.D. Lawendowski

Christ never promises peace in the sense of no more struggle and suffering. Instead, he helps us to struggle and suffer as he did, in love, for one another. Christ does not give us security in the sense of something in this world, some cause, some principle, some value, which is forever. Instead, he tells us that there is nothing in this world that is forever, all flesh is grass. He does not promise us unlonely lives. His own life speaks loud of how, in a world where there is little love, love is always lonely. Instead of all these, the answer that he gives, I think, is himself. If we go to him for anything else, he may send us away empty or he may not. But if we go to him for himself, I believe that we go away always with this deepest of all our hungers filled. — Frederick Buechner

It makes the ocean seem inconsequential, the moon unimportant, everything else nonexistent.
It fills all the empty spaces inside him, the ones he didn't know were there, and the ones he thought he'd already filled. And the future is laid plain before him. Their future. — Anna Banks

There's a big empty box filled with packaging peanuts and it's totally calling my name. — H.M. Ward

You must know nothing before you can learn something, and be empty before you can be filled. Is not the emptiness of the bowl what makes it useful? As for laws, a parrot can repeat them word for word. Their spirit is something else again. As for governing, one must first be lowest before being highest. — Lloyd Alexander

Let the mind be empty, and not filled with the things of the mind. Then there is only meditation, and not a meditor who is meditating ... The mind must be clear, without movement, and in the light of that clarity the timeless will be revealed. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Love is silent. Yet it could fill the spaces no other sound can ever do. Truth is there's no sound without silence. We can listen to all the beautiful songs, but unless we can hear where the music is coming from, the empty spaces of our lives can never be filled and the song we sing will have no meaning. — Frederick Espiritu

I kiss her again just to keep my mouth from admitting that it was. The beginning of the end. The very start of the saddest goodbye in history. Because after tonight, she'll walk away from me and go back to him, holding a piece of me in the palm of her hand. And whenever I look up at the sky at night, wondering where she is, if she's happy, if Evan laughs at her corny jokes or smiles whenever she does, that empty space left behind within me will ache with remembrance. Because her light once filled it. She filled me in a way that nobody on this Earth could. And I'll never feel whole again. — S.L. Jennings

One can no more set fire to the sea,
than convince people of the dangers of happiness - And yet, we know that though the smallest shock is fatal
to the filled up bottle, that shock will not break
the empty one. — Omar Khayyam

...explaining men still assume I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge. — Rebecca Solnit

When a person spends his entire day with no concern but Allah alone, Allah will take care of all his needs and take care of all that is worrying him; He will empty his heart so that it will be filled only with love for Him. — Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyya

Accuracy is the basis of style. Words dress our thoughts and should fit; and should fit not only in their utterances, but in their implications, their sequences, and their silences, just as in architecture the empty spaces are as important as those that are filled. — Freya Stark

Summer fades; the first cold, Northern air
Sweeps, like hatred, through still days -
The August heat now gone elsewhere,
To Southern, bird-filled coasts and bays;
Amid constricting vales of cloud,
A pale and liquid Autumn sun
That once beat down on an empty plain
And may again. And may again. — Trevor Howard

It's hard to be optimistic on the reservation. When a glass sits on a table here, people don't wonder if it's half filled or half empty. They just hope it's good beer. Still, Indians have a way of surviving. But it's almost like Indians can easily survive the big stuff. Mass murder, loss of language and land rights. It's the small things that hurt the most. The white waitress who wouldn't take an order, Tonto, the Washington Redskins. — Sherman Alexie

But explaining men still assume I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge. A Freudian would claim to know what they have and I lack, but intelligence is not situated in the crotch - even if you can write one of Virginia Woolf's long mellifluous musical sentences about the subtle subjugation of women in the snow with your willie. — Rebecca Solnit

In my parents' house, nothing was ever thrown away. Clothes piled up, formed drifts that grew into mountains Philip, Baron, and I would climb and leap from. The heaps of garments filled the hallway and chased my parents out of their own bedroom, so that they eventually slept in the room that was once Dad's office. Empty bags and boxes filled gaps in the clutter, boxes that once held rings and sneakers and clothes. A trumpet that my mother wanted to make into a lamp rested atop a stack of tattered magazines filled with articles Dad planned to read, near the heads and feet and arms of dolls Mom promised she would stitch together for a kid from Carney, all beside an endless heap of replacement buttons, some still in their individual glassine bags. A coffeemaker rested on a tower of plates, propped up on one end to keep coffee from flooding the counters. — Holly Black

There is only silence. A hollow silence for victors and losers all.
I am empty.
What do I do now? There was always a fear, always a concern, always a reason to hoard weapons and food, always a quest or trial. Now, nothing. Just the wind sweeping in over our battlefield. An empty battlefield filled only with echoes of things lost and learned. Friends. Lessons. Soon it will be a memory. I feel like a lover has died. I yearn to cry. Feel hollow. Adrift. I look for Mustang. Will she still care for me? — Pierce Brown

Few minds are spacious; few even have an empty place in them or can offer some vacant point. Almost all have narrow capacities and are filled by some knowledge that blocks them up. What a torture to talk to filled heads, that allow nothing from the outside to enter them! A good mind, in order to enjoy itself and allow itself to enjoy others, always keeps itself larger than its own thoughts. And in order to do this, these thoughts must be given a pliant form, must be easily folded and unfolded, so that they are capable, finally, of maintaining a natural flexibility.
All those short-sighted minds see clearly within their little ideas and see nothing in those of others; they are like those bad eyes that see from close range what is obscure and cannot perceive what is clear from afar. Night minds, minds of darkness. — Joseph Joubert

Thomas Merton to write: The modern child may early in his or her existence have natural inclinations toward spirituality. The child may have imagination, originality, a simple and individual response to reality, and even a tendency to moments of thoughtful silence and absorption. All these tendencies, however, are soon destroyed by the dominant culture. The child becomes a yelling, brash, false little monster, brandishing a toy gun or dressed up like some character he has seen on television. His head is filled with inane slogans, songs, noises, explosions, statistics, brand names, menaces, ribaldries, and cliches. Then, when the child gets to school, he learns to verbalize, rationalize, to pace, to make faces like an advertisement, to need a car and in short, to go through life with an empty head conforming to others, like himself, in togetherness.3 — Brennan Manning

I wonder at my incapacity for easy banter, smooth conversation, empty words to fill awkward moments. I don't have a closet filled with umms and ellipses ready to insert at the beginnings and ends of sentences. I don't know how to be a verb, an adverb, any kind of modifier. I'm a noun through and through. — Tahereh Mafi

I ponder the rhythms of letting go and embracing whatever is around the corner, trusting that the empty spaces will be filled. And knowing that sometimes community can happen only in the gaps where mystery resides. — Joyce Hollyday

What did falling in love do for you? Can you ever really explain it? It filled empty spaces I never knew were empty. It cured a loneliness I never knew I had. It gave me joy. And freedom. I think that was the most amazing part. I suddenly felt both embraced and freed at the same time. — Louise Penny

There's a kind of luck that's not much more than being in the right place at the right time, a kind of inspiration that's not much more than doing the right thing in the right way, and both only really happen to you when you empty your heart of ambition, purpose, and plan; when you give yourself, completely, to the golden, fate-filled moment. — Gregory David Roberts

Silent waters rocking on the morning of our birth,
like an empty cradle waiting to be filled.
And from the heart of God the Spirit moved upon the earth,
like a mother breathing life into her child. — Gordon Lightfoot

To it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits[1] of the world, and not according to Christ. 9For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, 10and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority. 11In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, 12 having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead. 13 And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, 14by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. — Anonymous

Basically, my vagina was a metaphor for my empty heart and it needed to be filled before I decided that my stomach was also a metaphor and I ate my way through this whole situation. — Britt Hayes

And each day when Poseidon & his entourage of Goddesses & Nymphs arrived, Hera would come with them. And as the amphora began to be filled with Poseidon's seed, Hera would report that her amphora would take much longer to fill, as Zeus, her husband, was not a willing donor. But she had in fact been cheating by instructing her daughters, Hebe & Eilithyia, to empty the amphora filled with their father's seed into the rivers & streams, lakes & ponds, & the springs in the woods, so that the amphora would never be full, as this was the only way she could continue to keep her husband's sex drive in check, & with good reason to do so. — Nicholas Chong

She'd said that revenge was not sweet, that it was bloody. She was wrong. It *was* sweet. For one fleeting, glorious moment you felt incredible satisfaction. Then it was gone, empty, and you had to go on living. The power high that filled me with her light had faded, and all I tasted now were bitter ashes. — Sunny

In a society of increasingly mass-produced, assembly-line entertainment, where every individual is treated like an empty pitcher to be filled from above, jazz retains something of the spirit of the handicrafts of yesteryear. The print of the human spirit warms it. Deep down, jazz expresses the enforced & compassionate attitudes of a minority group and may well appeal to us because we all have blue moods and, in a fundamental sense, none of us is wholly free. — Marshall W. Stearns

A large house left deserted by those who have filled its rooms with emotions and life, expresses a silence, a quality all its own. A house unfurnished and empty seems less impressively silent. The fact of its devoidness of sound is upon the whole more natural. But carpets accustomed to the pressure of constantly passing feet, chairs and sofas which have held human warmth, draperies used to the touch of hands drawing them aside to let in daylight, pictures which have smiled back at thinking eyes, mirrors which have reflected faces passing hourly in changing moods, elate or dark or longing, walls which have echoed back voices - all these things when left alone seem to be held in strange arrest, as if by some spell intensifying the effect of the pause in their existence. — Frances Hodgson Burnett

I'll only ever worship these lips. I'll only ever worship this body." Gripping the back of her neck tighter, Gavin deepened the kiss. "When I look at you, I feel like I'm looking at the other half of myself. You've filled the empty space in my soul, and because of that, you're a goddess to me. That's the way I'm always going to treat you. For the rest of your life. I promise you that. I fucking promise. — Gail McHugh

If there is anything certain in life, it is this. Time doesn't always heal. Not really. I know they say it does, but that is not true. What time does is to trick you into believing that you have healed, that the hurt of a great loss has lessened. But a single word, a note of a song, a fragrance, a knife point of dawn light across an empty room, any one of these things will take you back to that one moment you have never truly forgotten. These small things are the agents of memory. They are the sharp needle points piercing the living fabric of your life.

Life, my children, isn't linear where the heart is concerned. It is filled with invisible threads that reach out from your past and into your future. These threads connect every second we have lived and breathed. As your own lives move forward and as the decades pass, the more of these threads are cast. Your task is to weave them into a tapestry, one that tells the story of the time we shared. — Stephen Lee

A girlfriend once shared with me the theory about the three buckets we hold in our lives. One bucket contains our connection, another our vitality, and a third our contribution. The theory goes like this: when one bucket is empty, the others need to be filled. When you're feeling lonely, alienated, and low on connection, boost your vitality and contribution. Take a walk, cook a nutritious meal, volunteer to bake cookies for the blood drive. When you're feeling spent and low on energy, on stamina, perhaps you've been neglecting connections and contributions. Invite a few friends over for takeout and brainstorm creative projects. When you're feeling as if you have nothing to give, nothing to contribute, fill your connection and vitality buckets. — Erin Loechner

The eve of a long trip is filled with both exaltation and anxiety, but the day itself is a pure euphoria of action, and anxiety returns in the middle of the trip, at an empty moment, when the exoticism of the setting out has not yet given way to that of going home. — Edouard Leve

Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after. — T. S. Eliot

What is my task? First of all, my task is to be pleasing to Christ. To be empty of self and be filled with Himself. To be filled with the Holy Spirit; to be led by the Holy Spirit. — Aimee Semple McPherson

In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don't know what I am. I don't know if I am or not. — William Faulkner

Time is like a river flowing endlessly through the universe. And if you poled your flatboat in that river you might fight your way against the current and travel upstream into the past. Or go with the flow and rush into the future. This was in a less cynical time before toxic waste dumping and pollution filled the waterway of Chronus with the detritus of empty hours wasted minutes years of repetition and time that has been killed. — Harlan Ellison

Much that was called religion has carried an unconscious attitude of hostility toward life. True religion must teach that life is filled with joys pleasing to the eye of God, that knowledge without action is empty. All men must see that the teaching of religion by rules and rote is largely a hoax. The proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you've always known. — Frank Herbert

Space exploration promised us alien life, lucrative planetary mining, and fabulous lunar colonies. News flash, ladies and gents: Space is nearly empty. It's a sterile vacuum, filled mostly with the junk we put up there. — Graham Hawkes

If there's empty spaces in your heart,
They'll make you think it's wrong,
Like having empty spaces,
Means you never can be strong,
But I've learned that all these spaces,
Means there's room enough to grow,
And the people that once filled them,
Were always meant to be let go,
And all these empty spaces,
Create a strange sort of pull,
That attract so many people,
You wouldn't meet if they were full,
So if you're made of empty spaces,
Don't ever think it's wrong,
Because maybe they're just empty,
Until the right person comes along. — Ernest Hemingway,

Do you remember? Do you remember being solid? Do you remember life before the hole? Before you were empty and needed to be filled? There was a time when everything was enough. There was a time you didn't try to get out of your own skin. Remember? — Amy Reed

Shashank glanced at Rihaan. "What I mean is, that a time will come when you'll find an empty space inside that can only be filled with love. Mark my words." And on that cryptic note he pulled to a halt. Rihaan adjusted the ubiquitous — Simi K. Rao

The wife carries the burden of the marriage on her shoulders," his mother said. "Her husband, herself, both of them, their covenant, and everything else that gets added over the years. And all that is very, very heavy. It is in her power to keep the marriage alive and thriving, but also to drive it to the brink of crisis and back again. For whatever reason, men have not taken this role upon themselves. Perhaps they are not capable. Now, as you know, every empty space, every abyss created in nature fills itself, and this one is filled by women out of a sense of responsibility and maybe also the will to control. It's a simple matter, really, but in case you haven't understood, I'll explain it: your wife must be happy, satisfied, fulfilled, and impassioned, and then the burden of marriage will not be heavy for her. She'll be prepared to take it upon herself for better and for worse until the very day that one of you shuts your eyes for good. — Anat Talshir

We feign disinterest and laugh, and creep into the kitchen some nights, a triangle of light spilled on the floor form the fridge, shoveling cold casseroles, ice cream, jelly, cheese, into our mouths, swallowing without chewing as we listen to the steady, echoing tisk-tisk-tisk of the clock. I have done this. Millions of people have done this. There is an empty space in many of us that gnaws at our ribs and cannot be filled by any amount of food. There is a hunger for something, and we never know quite what it is, only that it is a hunger, so we eat. — Marya Hornbacher

And he thought: I'm a seed.
He suddenly saw how fertile was the ground into which he had fallen, and with this realization, the terrible purpose filled him, creeping through the empty places within, threatening to choke him with grief. — Frank Herbert

I miss my father. I miss my grandfather. I miss my home. And I miss my mother. But the thing is, for almost three years, I managed not to miss any of them. And then I spent that one day with that one girl. One day ... It was like she gave me her whole self, and somehow as a result, I gave her more of myself than I even realized there was to give. But then she was gone. And only after I'd been filled up by her, by that day, did I understand how empty I really was. — Gayle Forman

We have to face the unpleasant as well as the affirmative side of the human story, including our own story as a nation, our own stories of our peoples. We have got to have the ugly facts in order to protect us from the official view of reality. Otherwise, we are squeezed empty and filled with what other people want us to think and feel and experience. — Bill Moyers

When the palace is magnificent, the fields are filled with weeds, and the granaries are empty. — Laozi

Good writing arises out of obsession. With obsession there is emotional depth and a certain weight and gravity to the language and story. Without obsession I would be empty, and, literally, I wonder if I would even have any substance. The body is like a cathedral, and the cathedral needs music and prayer filling its grand spaces. Obsession turning over and over within the body creates music, prayer, substance that, although providing the depth, weight, and gravity I first evoked, also allows for lyricism, lightness, and flight up into the various arches and ellipses of the cathedral. Obsession is filled with slowness - and so obsession in my writing, for good or bad, doesn't come about because of an immediate intellectual idea or problem, nor a quick flash of inspiration. There's this slow energy at work, and I begin to become a part of that when I'm very close to silence. — Fred Arroyo

But when he looked her in the eye and spoke quietly to her and only her, it filled an empty place inside her, and even made her eyes misty. It made her believe that she was just as worthy as a wealthy daughter of a nobleman. Or — Melanie Dickerson

I wonder
from these thousand of "me's",
which one am I?
Listen to my cry, do not drown my voice
I am completely filled with the thought of you.
Don't lay broken glass on my path
I will crush it into dust.
I am nothing, just a mirror in the palm of your hand,
reflecting your kindness, your sadness, your anger.
If you were a blade of grass or a tiny flower
I will pitch my tent in your shadow.
Only your presence revives my withered heart.
You are the candle that lights the whole world
and I am an empty vessel for your light.
Rumi - "Hidden Music — Rumi