Empty Time Quotes & Sayings

No more noisy, loud words from me
such is my master's will. Henceforth I deal in whispers. The speech of my heart will be carried on in murmurings of a song.
Men hasten to the King's market. All the buyers and sellers are there. But I have my untimely leave in the middle of the day, in the thick of work.
Let then the flowers come out in my garden, though it is not their time; and let the midday bees strike up their lazy hum.
Full many an hour have I spent in the strife of the good and the evil, but now it is the pleasure of my playmate of the empty days to draw my heart on to him; and I know not why is this sudden call to what useless inconsequence! — Rabindranath Tagore

We are told that if you are not occupied with the mind all the time, then you will invite the devil. It is such a heightened misconception that people are going crazy just because of this. An empty mind is not the devil's home but an empty mind is the home of the Buddha. — Anandmurti Gurumaa

To gain anything we have longed for is only to discover how vain and empty it is; and even though we are always living in expectation of better things, at the same time we often repent and long to have the past back again. — Arthur Schopenhauer

You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: There is nothing there ... You feel the world's word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: This hum is the silence. — Annie Dillard

All I wanted to do was get back to Africa. We had not left it, yet, but when I would wake in the night I would lie, listening, homesick for it already. Now, looking out the tunnel of trees over the ravine at the sky with white clouds moving across in the wind, I loved the country so that I was happy as you are after you have been with a woman that you really love, when, empty, you feel it welling up again and there it is and you can never have it all and yet what there is, now, you can have, and you want more and more, to have, and be, and live in, to possess now again for always, for that long sudden-ended always; making time stand still, sometimes so very still that afterwards you wait to hear it move, and it is slow in starting. But you are not alone because if you have every really loved her happy and untragic, she loves you always; no matter whom she loves nor where she goes she loves you more. — Ernest Hemingway,

There are times when words seem empty and only actions seem great. Such a time has come, and in the Providence of God America will once more have an opportunity to show the world that she was born to save mankind. — Woodrow Wilson

Demelza thought: She's one day too late, just one day. How beautiful she is; how I hate her. Then she glanced at Ross again, and for the first time like the stab of a treacherous knife it occurred to her that Ross's desire for her last night was a flicker for empty passion. All day she had been too preoccupied with her own feelings to spare time for his. Now she could see so much in his eyes. — Winston Graham

Time lost is time not filled, time left empty. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

We got back to my house to find it ransacked. It was difficult to tell because I'm not the world's greatest housekeeper myself, but by the time I was in the kitchen I knew they had been here: I don't normally keep the oven open. I whipped out the gun and prowled around the house, finding it empty. Amy asked what they were looking for. I dodged the question by pointing out what a pity it was they tossed the place because it was immaculate before they got here and that it was too bad she didn't get to see it when it was clean. I went to the kitchen and ran water over my bleeding knuckles.
"Look," Amy said, from behind me. "They threw laundry all over your floor in there."
"Yeah. And they wore the clothes first, the bastards. — David Wong

One day Lal shahbaz was wandering in the desert with his friend Sheikh Bhaa ud-Din Zakariya. It was winter, and evening time, so they began to build a fire to keep warm. They found some wood, but then they realised they had no fire. So Baha ud- Din suggested that Lal Shahbaz turn himself into a falcon and get fire from hell. Off he flew, but an hour later he came back empty handed. "There is no fire in hell," he reported. "Everyone who goes there brings their own fire, and their own pain, from this world. — William Dalrymple

Once I knew, then I forgot. It was as if I had fallen asleep in a field only to discover at waking that a grove of trees had grown up around me.
"Doubt nothing, believe everything," was my friend's idea of metaphysics, although his brother ran away with his wife. He still bought her a rose every day, sat in the empty house for the next twenty years talking to her about the weather.
I was already dozing off in the shade, dreaming that the rustling trees were my many selves explaining themselves all at the same time so that I could not make out a single word. My life was a beautiful mystery on the verge of understanding, always on the verge! Think of it!
My friend's empty house with every one of its windows lit. The dark trees multiplying all around it. — Charles Simic

What is this war we are waging, when defeat is so certain? Day after day, already wearied by the constant onslaught, we face out terror of the everyday, the endless passageway that, in the end - because we have spent so much time walking to and fro between its walls -will become a destiny. Yes, my angel, that is our everyday existence: dreary, empty and mired in troubles. The pathways of hell are hardly foreign; we shall end up there one day if we tarry too long. — Muriel Barbery

Everyone feels hemmed in from time to time, no matter where they live." She laid a hand on his thigh. "When I'm feeling that way, I go to Ireland. Walk along an empty beach. When I do, I think of all the people who have walked there before, and will walk there again. Then it occurs to me that nothing is forever. No matter how bad, or how good, everything passes and moves on to another level." "'All things change; nothing perishes,'" he mumbled. — Nora Roberts

While most people became irritable when hungry, a redheaded person with an empty stomach was a walking time bomb. — Diana Gabaldon

just because of its promise of unlimited possibilities technology is an empty form like the most formalistic logic and is unable to determine the content of life.that is why our time,being the most intensely technical,is also the emptiest in all human history. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

I quickly lost track of time. I forgot that my avatar was sitting in Halliday's bedroom and that, in reality, I was sitting in my hideout, huddled near the electric heater, tapping at the empty air in front of me, entering commands on an imaginary keyboard. All of the intervening layers slipped away, and I lost myself in the game within the game. In — Ernest Cline

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning. — T. S. Eliot

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell, But on earth indifference is the least We have to dread from man or beast. How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me. Admirer as I think I am Of stars that do not give a damn, I cannot, now I see them, say I missed one terribly all day. Were all stars to disappear or die, I should learn to look at an empty sky And feel its total dark sublime, Though this might take me a little time. — W. H. Auden

When was the last time we talked? Before we moved? Even now, when we had time to talk, he walked off to make phone calls. I thought I should be disappointed or sad but I wasn't. I was empty. Strangers in a strange family. — C.L.Stone

Let the author beware of popularity, otherwise he will be defeated by success. There is a time when you must take a picture of yourself. Hunger is always the same as the first hunger. The need renews itself empty and entire. — Clarice Lispector

You don't need a foreign policy expert to tell you empty threats and hollow promises don't work. Ask any parent of a rebellious teenager. If you don't make good on the threats, you're asking for worse behavior next time. — Kathleen Troia McFarland

The black fist is a meaningless symbol. When you open it, you have nothing but fingers - weak, empty fingers. The only time the black fist has significance is when there's money inside. There's where the power lies. — Jesse Owens

It's a great time to book vacation travel for the winter, .. After the first of the year, airplanes are empty, resorts are empty, and they are very excited to get early bookings. — Terry Jones

I do not know, not do I care to remember
The time in which I knew distinctly that you were gone
You fade in and out of memory
Upon which I can not feign to touch
Or feel
How cruel to leave me
With paper but no pen
What a way to leave me
You give me cups, but not water to fill them
So they sit there
Empty
Your reflection
Bouncing to and fro
From every surface — Queenbe Monyei

It felt most strange to stand here in the silence and know that he was about to leave the house for the last time. Long ago, when he had been left alone while the Dursleys went out to enjoy themselves, the hours of solitude had been a rare treat: pausing only to sneak something tasty from the fridge he had rushed upstairs to play on Dudley's computer, or put on the television and flicked through the channels to his heart's content. It gave him an odd, empty feeling to remember those times; it was like remembering a younger brother whom he had lost. — J.K. Rowling

Quote from "FUTURE GONE":
" ... I wonder what actually this hospital is, why I am in it and who I am. I have no time to find out. I die, with my arms stretched towards the spotlights.
Then whiteness.
My body is still there somewhere ...
Buried in the extremely bright lights of empty hope". — Alexandar Tomov

I had a fifth grade teacher who, as a very small way of trying to contain my class clown energy, gave me 10 minutes at the end of class every Friday to present whatever I wanted. A lot of the time, I did an Andy Rooney impression. I would sit at her desk, empty it, and just comment on what was in there. — Andy Daly

But-when you really think about it-that emotional support only applies to the experience of living in public. We don't have ways to quantify ideas like "amazing" or "successful" or "lovable" without the feedback of an audience. Nobody sits by himself in an empty room and thinks "I'm amazing." It's impossible to imagine how that would work. But being "amazing" is supposed to be what life is about. As a result, the windows of time people spend by themselves become these meaningless experiences that don't really count. It's filler. They're deleted scenes. pg 156 — Chuck Klosterman

The nothingth of a second for which the hole existed reverberated backwards and forwards through time in a most improbable fashion. Somewhere in the deeply remote past it seriously traumatized a small random group of atoms drifting through the empty sterility of space and made them cling together in the most extraordinarily unlikely patterns. These patterns quickly learnt to copy themselves (this was part of what was so extraordinary about the patterns) and went on to cause massive trouble on every planet they drifted on to. That was how life began in the Universe. — Douglas Adams

Being packed all the time, even when not in use, must feel something like going to bed on an empty stomach. — Marie Kondo

I was waiting for the longest time, she said. I thought you forgot.
It is hard to forget, I said, when there is such an empty space when you are gone. — Brian Andreas

It had been an indisputably good time, but now I felt empty. Like there was something I didn't even know I wanted until I didn't get it. — Cheryl Strayed

Every month there is a moon, gigantic, round, heavy, an omen. IT transits, pauses, continues on and passes out of sight, and I see despair coming towards me like famine. To feel that empty, again, again. I listen to my heart, wave upon wave, salty and red, continuing on and on, marking time. — Margaret Atwood

I want to work, but I certainly am not going to be clawing at empty things when I can completely fill up my bucket with them - the other is a waste of my time. — Kelli O'Hara

Empty, empty, empty; silent, silent, silent. The room was a shell, singing of what was before time was; a vase stood in the heart of the house, alabaster, smooth, cold, holding the still, distilled essence of emptiness, silence. — Virginia Woolf

I'm trying to figure out how much I need to deposit into the Kate-have-a-good-time fund," he said.
"It's pretty empty.You might have to make a substanial deposit." I couldn't believe how breathless I sounded,like I'd been running beside a snowmobile instead of riding on it.
His grin grew."I'm still strapped for cash."
"You're torturing me,you know thst? Did you take lessons from Sam?"
"I'm torturing you?Geez,you've been torturing me since the day we got here. — Rachel Hawthorne

Demonstrative proof is lacking, but if we thought only about those things about which such proof were available, our minds would be empty most of the time. — Theodore Dalrymple

Pray, even if you feel nothing, see nothing. For when you are dry, empty, sick or weak, at such a time is your prayer most pleasing to God, even though you may find little joy in it. This is true of all believing prayer. — Julian Of Norwich

There are such moments in life: one unexpectedly discovers that perfection exists, that it, too, is a tiny sphere traveling in time, empty, transparent, luminous, and which sometimes (rarely) comes in our direction and encircles us for a few brief moments before traveling on to other parts and other people. — Jose Saramago

To see an input stream at work, enter cat (with no filenames) and press ENTER. This time, you won't get your shell prompt back because cat is still running. Now type anything and press ENTER at the end of each line. The cat command repeats any line that you type. Once you're sufficiently bored, press CTRL-D on an empty line to terminate cat and return to the shell prompt. — Brian Ward

There was a gentle glow coming on in the sky to my right as I drove north through the cold and empty beauty of the Adirondack Park. I would have pointed the impending dawn out to the girl in the back of my Element if she wasn't unconscious and bleeding on the easy-to-clean floor. I crossed the northern border of the Park at the same time that the sun crept over the white pines on the side of road. I don't know if that first ray of morning caught her eye, but my passenger groaned, cleared her throat a bit to try and speak, then clacked her teeth hard together again to hold back whatever she was starting to say. I consulted the map in my head, determined that I wouldn't make it to the house before she started acting up, thought about Murphy's Law and the prevalence of state troopers on backcountry roads for only a moment, and then pulled over to deal with Sadie Hostetler. — Jamie Sheffield

Dorothy Sayers challenged the thought of many nay-sayers of her time who claimed that doctrinal preaching led to boredom and a lack of interest. She wrote: Official Christianity, of late years, has been having what is known as bad press. We are constantly assured that the churches are empty because preachers insist too much upon doctrine - "dull dogma," as people call it. The fact is the precise opposite. It is the neglect of dogma that makes for dullness. The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that staggered the imagination of man - and the dogma is the drama.2 — Robert Smith Jr.

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. — Max Muller

Ah, mistress, you're an angel. Sure there's not a drop left? I might have remembered one more person ... ."
"Up yours," I said rudely with another belch. "It's empty. You should tell me the name anyway, after making me drink all that sewage."
Winston gave me a devious smile. "Come back with a full bottle and I will."
"Selfish spook," I mumbled, and staggered away.
I'd made it a few feet when I felt that distinct pins-and-needles sensation again, only this time it wasn't in my throat.
"Hey!"
I looked down in time to see Winston's grinning, transparent form fly out of my pants. He was chuckling even as I smacked at myself and hopped up and down furiously.
"Drunken filthy pig!" I spat. "Bastard!"
"And a good eve'in' to you, too, mistress!" he called out, his edges starting to blur and fade. "Come back soon!"
"I hope worms shit on your corpse!" was my reply. A ghost had just gotten to third base with me. Could I sink any lower? — Jeaniene Frost

Look at it, Dane. Look at the city and the world in its proud array, like a cask of jewels laid open for you. It'll offer you everything you ever wanted but it's just pictures on billboards; dream cars, dream women, dream houses.
Time to wake up now and say goodbye.
Remember, Dane: there's other worlds out there. It's only empty air here. Jump out of the world, jump to the place I showed you and you'll not fall.
Are you ready? Are you ready to jump right off the edge of everything? — Grant Morrison

The digital clock that sat on the empty bookcase blinked insistently in the dim room. It was an hour and thirty-five minutes off, but Archie had never bothered to reset it, he just did the maths to calculate the time. — Chelsea Cain

I felt empty and sad for years, and for a long, long time, alcohol worked. I'd drink, and all the sadness would go away. Not only did the sadness go away, but I was fantastic. I was beautiful, funny, I had a great figure, and I could do math. But at some point, the booze stopped working. That's when drinking started sucking. Every time I drank, I could feel pieces of me leaving. I continued to drink until there was nothing left. Just emptiness. — Dina Kucera

But spending too much time in the human world does strange things to them. Perhaps it is the amount of iron and technology that is so fatal to their existence. They start to lose themselves, a little at a time, until they are only shadows of their former selves, empty husks covered in glamour to make them look real. Eventually, they simply cease to exist. — Julie Kagawa

How many more times do we have to come to terms with death before we find safety?" he asked.
He waited a few minutes, but the three of us didn't say anything. He continued: "Every time people come at us with the intention of killing us, I close my eyes and wait for death. Even though I am still alive, I feel like each time I accept death, part of me dies. Very soon I will completely die and all that will be left is my empty body walking with you. It will be quieter than I am. — Ishmael Beah

Better the crime,
the suicides of lovers, the incest committed
by brother and sister like two mirrors
in love with their likeness, better to eat
the poisoned bread, adultery on a bed
of ashes, ferocious love, the poisonous
vines of delirium, the sodomite who wears
a gob of spit for a rose in his lapel,
better to be stoned in the plaza than to turn
the mill that squeezes out the juice of life,
that turns eternity into empty hours,
minutes into prisons, and time into
copper coins and abstract shit — Octavio Paz

Grovelling then busking
All at once
And all in time
Leaving a Ferris-wheel trail
Across a deep mountainous climb
Descended with rapture and with joy
Their mindless triumphant demeanour
Gossamer wings parade-parade
These gormless little ants
Full to the brimful
Empty to the last meandering weight
Pulled across the
Rotting fruit filled with retiring goodness
Tiny prissy princelings
These masterful creatures
Filled with adventuring spirit
March on, march on
Under the forgiving human's
Watchful, waiting and wandering eye. — Abigail George

Weetzie could not even cry and make Kleenex roses. She remembered the day her father, Charlie, had driven away in the smashed yellow T-bird, leaving her mother Brandy-Lynn clutching her flowered robe with one hand and an empty glass in the other, and leaving Weetzie holding her arms crossed over her chest that was taking its time to develope into anything — Francesca Lia Block

In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America, where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time. We hadn't learned yet, that there was no such thing as an empty canvas. — Janet Fitch

For a long time I found the celebrities of modern painting and poetry ridiculous. I loved absurd pictures, fanlights, stage scenery, mountebanks backcloths, inn-signs, cheap colored prints; unfashionable literature, church Latin, pornographic books badly spelt, grandmothers novels, fairy stories, little books for children, old operas, empty refrains, simple rhythms. — Arthur Rimbaud

You cannot kill me here. Bring your soldiers, your death, your disease, your collapsed economy because it doesn't matter, I have nothing left to lose and you cannot kill me here. Bring the tears of orphans and the wails of a mother's loss, bring your God damn air force and Jesus on a cross, bring your hate and bitterness and long working hours, bring your empty wallets and love long since gone but you cannot kill me here. Bring your sneers, your snide remarks and friendships never felt, your letters never sent, your kisses never kissed, cigarettes smoked to the bone and cancer killing fears but you cannot kill me here. For I may fall and I may fail but I will stand again each time and you will find no satisfaction. Because you cannot kill me here. — Iain S. Thomas

Sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves lasting from twenty minutes to an hour at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for sighing, and an empty feeling in the abdomen, lack of muscular power, and an intense subjective distress described as tension or mental pain. Tightness in the throat. — Joan Didion

You see, King, we have a legend - I used to believe that it was all fairy-tale rubbish and empty smoke. It is a legend about how such things as war and death and despair were common in our country at one time. These terrible words, which we have long since stopped using in our language, can be read in collections of our old tales, and they sound awful to us and even a little ridiculous. Today I've learned that these tales are all true ... But now tell me, don't you have in your soul a sort of intimation that you're not doing the right thing? Don't you have a yearning for bright, serene gods, for sensible and cheerful leaders and mentors? Don't you ever dream in your sleep about another, more beautiful life where nobody is envious of others, where reason and order prevails, where people treat other people only with cheerfulness and considerations? — Hermann Hesse

It has been a long time since I've been in France. I miss the food like a phantom limb.'
...
'I shall bring you our best dishes,' he promised.
'And the wine to pair with them, she said.
He feigned exasperation. 'But of course, he said, 'would I blaspheme?' ...
She ate, her eyes half closed. All along, she'd known Lotto was with her, across the table, enjoying her food with her. He would've loved this night. Her dress, the food, the wind. The lust welled in her until it was almost unbearable. If she looked up, she knew she would see only an empty chair. She would not look up. — Lauren Groff

I call the high and light aspects of my being SPIRIT and the dark and heavy aspects SOUL.
Soul is at home in the deep shaded valleys.
Heavy torpid flowes saturated with black grow there.
The rivers flow like arm syrup. They empty into huge oceans of soul.
Spirit is a land of high,white peaks and glittering jewel-like lakes and flowers.
Life is sparse and sound travels great distances.
There is soul music, soul food, and soul love.
People need to climb the mountain not because it is there
But because the soulful divinity need to be mated with the Spirit.
Deep down we must have a rel affection for each other, a clear recognition of our shared human status. At the same time we must openly accept all ideologies and systems as means of solving humanity's problems. No matter how strong the wind of evil may blow, the flame of truth cannot be extinguished. — Dalai Lama XIV

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

and tonight we held each
other, one last time,
like a dance to a
slow song
on an empty
floor,
underneath a single
disco ball
in front of
no one
at all — Phil Volatile

One day they'll let you out of that dry, empty cell. You'll return to the Separates, and you'll feel the rain once more. And you'll grow straight, this time, toward this sunlight. I know you will. — Lucy Christopher

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

It is almost impossible to describe happiness, because at the time it feels entirely natural, as if all the rest of your life has been the aberration; only in retrospect does it swim into focus as the rare and precious thing it is. When it is present, it seems to be eternal, abiding forever, and there is no need to examine it or clutch it. Later, when it has evaporated, you stare in dismay at your empty palm, where only a little of the perfume lingers to prove that once it was there, and now is flown. — Margaret George

Here's a guy and everybody's there, right? Up to him to put down what's on everybody's mind. He starts the first chorus, then lines up his ideas, people, yeah, yeah, but get it, and then he rises to his fate and has to blow equal to it. All of a sudden somewhere in the middle of the chorus he gets it - everybody looks up and knows; they listen; he picks it up and carries. Time stops. He's filling empty space with the substance of our lives, confessions of his bellybottom strain, remembrance of ideas, rehashes of old blowing. He has to blow across bridges and come back and do it with such infinite feeling soul-exploratory for the tune of the moment that everybody knows it's not the tune that counts but IT. — Jack Kerouac

The richness of a moment comes when it's both full and empty at the same time. The truth is, we live simultaneously in time and timelessness. — Ram Dass

Musicians add to songs and they evolve: For as was true of human effort, there was never advancement. Everything added meant something lost, and about as often as not the thing lost was preferable to the thing gained, so that over time we'd be lucky if we just broke even. Any thought otherwise was empty pride. p. 380 — Charles Frazier

The holiday season can be an especially trying time for our service men, women, and families. Military service and deployment create empty seats at holiday tables, religious services, and celebrations. — Geoff Stults

And she loved a man who was made out of nothing. A few hours without him and right away she'd be missing him with her whole body, sitting in her office surrounded by polyethylene and concrete and thinking of him. And every time she'd boil water for coffee in her ground-floor office, she'd let the steam cover her face, imagining it was him stroking her cheeks, her eyelids and she'd wait for the day to be over, so she could go to her apartment building, climb the flight of stairs, turn the key in the door, and find him waiting for her, naked and still between the sheets of her empty bed. — Etgar Keret

Jean," Locke gasped out during a brief lull between spasms of retching, "next time I conceive a plan like this, consider putting a hatchet in my skull."
"Hardly efficacious." Jean swapped a full bucket for an empty one and gave Locke a friendly pat on the back. "Dulling my nice sharp blades on a skull as thick as yours ... — Scott Lynch

Oh God, I could be bounded in a nutshell - ' He continued, 'And count myself a king of infinite space - ' 'Were it not that I have bad dreams,' she whispered. He knew how she felt. It was the way he felt himself, sometimes, if he woke in the small hours, at three a.m., a time when the world seemed empty and stripped of comforting illusion. A time when you knew you were a mote, transient and fragile in a vast universe, a candle flame in an empty hall. Luckily the sun always came up, people stirred, and you got on with stuff that distracted you from the reality. The — Terry Pratchett

Your sense of pleasure becomes redefined. What offers immediate pleasure comes to seem like a distraction, an empty entertainment to help pass the time. Real pleasure comes from overcoming challenges, feeling confidence in your abilities, gaining fluency in skills, and experiencing the power this brings. You — Robert Greene

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

That's the thing I want to make clear about depression: It's got nothing at all to do with life. In the course of life, there is sadness and pain and sorror, all of which, in their right time and season, are normal - unpleasant, but normal. Depression is an altogether different zone because it involves a complete absence: absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest. The pain you feel in the course of a major clinical depression is an attempt on nature's part (nature, after all, abhors a vacuum) to fill up the empty space. But for all intents and purposes, the deeply depressed are just the walking, waking dead. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

The saddest thing of all was that their party represented a deviation from the conditions of the time. It was impossible to imagine that in the houses across the lane people were eating and drinking in the same way at such an hour. Beyond the window lay mute, dark, hungry Moscow. Her food stores were empty, and people had even forgotten to think of such things as game and vodka.
And thus it turned out that the only true life is one that resembles the life around us and drowns in it without leaving a trace, that isolated happiness is not happiness, so that duck and alcohol, when they seem to be the only ones in town, are not alcohol and a duck at all. — Boris Pasternak

Posthuman. It was a word that came up in the media every five or six years, and it meant different things every time. Neural regrowth hormone? Posthuman. Sex robots with inbuilt pseudo intelligence? Posthuman. Self-optimizing network routing? Posthuman. It was a word from advertising copy, breathless and empty, and all he'd ever thought it really meant was that the people using it had a limited imagination about what exactly humans were capable of. — James S.A. Corey

The first time I ever saw your face, I thought the sun rose in your eyes and the moon and the stars were the gifts you gave to the dark and empty sky, my love. — Ewan MacColl

PRACTICE OF THE Art of Peace is an act of faith, a belief in the ultimate power of nonviolence. It is faith in the power of purification and faith in the power of life itself. It is not a type of rigid discipline or empty asceticism. It is a path that follows natural principles, principles, that must be applied to daily living. The Art of Peace should be practiced from the time you rise to greet the morning to the time you retire at night. — Morihei Ueshiba

You taught me what reality really is. To-night, for the first time in my life, I saw through the hollowness, the sham, the silliness of the empty pageant in which I had always played. To-night, for the first time, I became conscious that the Romeo was hideous, and old, and painted, that the moonlight in the orchard was false, that the scenery was vulgar, and that the words I had to speak were unreal, were not my words, were not what I wanted to say. — Oscar Wilde

Wow," the empty air finally said. "Wow. That puts a pretty different perspective on things, I have to say. I'm going to remember this the next time I feel an impulse to blame myself for something. Neville, the term in the literature for this is 'egocentric bias', it means that you experience everything about your own life but you don't get to experience everything else that happens in the world. There was way, way more going on than you running in front of me. You're going to spend weeks remembering that thing you did there for six seconds, I can tell, but nobody else is going to bother thinking about it. Other people spend a lot less time thinking about your past mistakes than you do, just because you're not the center of their worlds. I guarantee to you that nobody except you has even considered blaming Neville Longbottom for what happened to Hermione. Not for a fraction of a second. You are being, if you will pardon the phrase, a silly-dilly. Now shut up and say goodbye. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

Fine." Patrick muttered without confidence. "Anything is better than waiting around here." "Time for a little family reunion." Johnny remarked. At the agreement, the four trekked the rest of the way down the empty alley. As he passed the final building Patrick peered — Brendan Walsh

I used to think I couldn't go a day without your smile. Without telling you things and hearing your voice back.
Then, that day arrived and it was so damn hard but the next was harder. I knew with a sinking feeling it was going to get worse, and I wasn't going to be okay for a very long time.
Because losing someone isn't an occasion or an event. It doesn't just happen once. It happens over and over again. I lose you every time I pick up your favorite coffee mug; whenever that one song plays on the radio, or when I discover your old t-shirt at the bottom of my laundry pile.
I lose you every time I think of kissing you, holding you, or wanting you. I go to bed at night and lose you, when I wish could tell you about my day. And in the morning, when I wake and reach for the empty space across the sheets, begin to lose you all over again. — Lang Leav

I turned and moved fast, focusing swiftly on a wave I had selected for no reason. There was whiteness and grenyess in it and a sort of blue and green. It was a line. It did not toss, nor did it stay still. It was all movement, all spillage, but it was pure containment as well, utterly focused just as I was watching it. It had an elemental hold; it was something coming towards us as though to save us but it did nothing instead, it withdrew in a shurgging irony, as if to suggest that this is what the world is, and our time in it, all lifted possibility, all complexity and rushing fervour, to end in nothing on a small strand, and go back out to rejoin the empty family from whom we had set out alone with such a burst of brave unknowing energy. — Colm Toibin

Surprisingly, Gestalt psychologists have found that when subjected to Ganz fields for long periods of time, we hallucinate. Can empty fields serve as mirrors, not for our exteriors, but for our interiors? — John Paul Caponigro

In the popular imagination, the Big Bang is a great explosion; at one time there was nothing, then matter erupted into previously empty space. However, the Big Bang is the beginning of spacetime itself, not an event in time. — Taner Edis

Once in camp I put a log on a fire and it was full of ants. As it commenced to burn, the ants swarmed out and went first toward the center where the fire was; then turned back and ran toward the end. When there were enough on the end they fell off into the fire. Some got out, their bodies burnt and flattened, and went off not knowing where they were going. But most of them went toward the fire and then back toward the end and swarmed on the cool end and finally fell off into the fire. I remember thinking at the time that it was the end of the world and a splendid chance to be a messiah and lift the log off the fire and throw it out where the ants could get off onto the ground. But I did not do anything but throw a tin cup of water on the log, so that I would have the cup empty to put whiskey in before I added water to it. I think the cup of water on the burning log only steamed the ants. — Ernest Hemingway,

But here's the problem: fewer and fewer folks are willing to do this. I'm constantly railing on my Boundless audience to go out and get a mentor. I think I've finally driven it far enough into their skulls. The problem is, they're coming back to me, saying, "Lisa, we're trying, but no one's willing to take us on." Seriously? Empty nesters, where are you? Retirees, surely you have some time. — Lisa Anderson

So much of my sense of who I am is tied to mothering. When they left home, I fell into a huge, empty, black hole. Your children are grown and your career has slowed down - all the stuff that took up so much attention is gone, and you're left with expansive time and space. — Jessica Lange

That was the only time, as I stood there, looking at that strange rubbish, feeling the wind coming across those empty fields, that I started to imagine just a little fantasy thing, because this was Norfolk after all, and it was only a couple of weeks since I'd lost him. I was thinking about the rubbish, the flapping plastic in the branches, the shore-line of odd stuff caught along the fencing, and I half-closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I'd ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it, and if I waited long enough, a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field, and gradually get larger until I'd see it was Tommy, and he'd wave, maybe even call. The fantasy never got beyond that
I didn't let it
and though the tears rolled down my face, I wasn't sobbing or out of control. I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be. — Kazuo Ishiguro

He envisaged her in the heaven he had learned about in childhood: a grassy place with blue sky and a light breeze. He could no longer picture the inhabitants with anything as ridiculous as wings. Instead he saw Nancy strolling in a simple sheath dress, her low shoes held in her hand and a shady tree beckoning her in the distance. The rest of the time, he could not hold on to this vision and she was only gone, like Bertie, and he was left to struggle on alone in the awful empty space of unbelief. — Helen Simonson

The shadows that lingered in the corners of the large chamber were a reflection of what he felt inside - an empty shell of darkness. Of the last three decades of his punishment, this was the first time that he felt forsaken. Now, he truly knew what it felt like to be one of the fallen, without the light of having or giving love. — L.G. Castillo

The hard work of sowing seed in what looks like perfectly empty earth has a time of harvest. All suffering, pain, emptiness, disappointment is seed: sow it in God and He will, finally, bring a crop of joy from it. — Eugene H. Peterson

Why did you make it so hard for me? I'd rather empty the ocean with a sieve. I do it for you. Or count the grains of sand on every beach. All for you. There are so many people, so many countries. But I have time. All the time in the world. Eternity. — Grant Morrison

In war," answered the weaver, "the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich make slaves of the poor. We must work to live, and they give us such mean wages that we die. We toil for them all day long, and they heap up gold in their coffers, and our children fade away before their time, and the faces of those we love become hard and evil. We tread out the grapes, another drinks the wine. We sow the corn, and our own board is empty. We have chains, though no eye beholds them; and are slaves, though men call us free. — Oscar Wilde

Richard stood, running his fingers through his thick hair, getting it out of his face, and showing his chest off to good advantage. For the first time, I wondered if he'd done it on purpose. I searched his face for that edge of teasing that Jean-Claude had, that knowledge that even that simple movement touched me. There was nothing. Richard's face was guileless, handsome, empty of ulterior motives. I exchanged glances with Jean-Claude. He shrugged. "If you do not understand him, do not look to me. I am not in love with him." Richard looked puzzled. "Did I miss something? — Laurell K. Hamilton

Now, almost one hundred years later, it is difficult to fully appreciate how much our picture of the universe has changed in the span of a single human lifetime.
As far as the scientific community in 1917 was concerned, the universe was static and eternal, and consisted of a one single galaxy, our Milky Way, surrounded by vast, infinite, dark, and empty space.
This is, after all, what you would guess by looking up at the night sky with your eyes, or with a small telescope, and at the time there was little reason to suspect otherwise. — Lawrence M. Krauss

Vonnegut was talking," I say today, "about the psychic effects of trauma." There's a sentence of Alice Miller's looping in my mind, about grandiose people and depressives, Narcissus and Echo: "Neither can accept the truth that this loss or absence of love has already happened in the past, and that no effort whatsoever can change this fact." It's the main thing I've learned from reading all this psychology: the future is always trying to feel like the past. When it does, it feels like selfishness, hurt, loss at the hands of others. The trick is to let it empty. Maybe this is another way to come unstuck in time. — Kristin Dombek

From midnight to 4: 00 AM is the loneliest time in the world. Because for those of us too sad to sleep, the only thing we have to look at is an empty bed, and the only thing we have to think of is every single person who didn't want to fill it tonight. — Lone Alaskan Gypsy

Everyone is in such a hurry. People haven't found meaning in their lives, so they're running all the time looking for it. They think the next car, the next house, the next job. Then they find those things are empty, too, and they keep running. Once you start running, it's hard to slow yourself down. — Mitch Albom

Written truth is four-dimensional. If we consult it at the wrong time, or read it at the wrong place, it is as empty and shapeless as a dress on a hook. — Robert Grudin