Quotes & Sayings About Feeling Of Emptiness

Home, he murmured. It's always the hardest to leave ... because it gives you the biggest punch in the gut as you're on your way off. All the memories come flooding in ... and you're left with a feeling of emptiness. You're homesick before you're even gone. — Zechariah Barrett

She had been feeling it more and more lately. The walls were closing in around her. The emptiness, the thoughts hidden behind thick walls of work. The unfathomable futility of it all. — Joakim Zander

You see, until then I'd been driven. I'd had a true quest, a purpose beyond my function - and then suddenly, the quest was over.
I felt ... drained. Disappointed. Let down.
Does that make sense? I had been sure that as soon as I had everything back I'd feel good. But inside I felt worse than when I stared. — Neil Gaiman

Passion is what we live for. The excitement it brings us, the drive we feel to do it, the feeling of emptiness and confusion if we ever lost it. Like a lover, it can cheat and leave us, but also infatuate us. With drool dripping down our chins, we lunge and become one with it so we are inseparable - complete - as our insides begin exploding like fireworks. We claw ourselves onto it like we aren't ever going to let go of that single craving. Sometimes, it feels like we won't.... — Monique N. Peterson

When I think of Tobias it is not with the same feeling as when I think of Khajami. How could it be the same, when a child and a husband demand a different kind of love altogether from your heart? It does not feel as though Tobias is still inside of me. He was my husband, my protector, and I respected him. I miss Tobias, and I am proud that I was his wife. A kind of emptiness and happiness are woven together inside my voice when the other washing women ask me about what my husband was like, and I answer with words that lift up to the sky. — Melanie Schnell

For much of my life I would crave attention with a carnal intensity. From anyone. From everyone. That feeling of being chosen. I would flirt with anyone who was congenial and amenable - a ravenous, indiscriminate flirtation, or a feather-light, barely-there one - or allow myself to be flirted with, by women and men alike, to cover the emptiness I felt or to fill in the hole, the desired culmination being not so much physical intimacy as emotional affirmation. The boy who had once felt invisible would forever ache simply to be seen. — Charles M. Blow

So that's how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that's stolen from us
that's snatched right out of our hands
even if we are left completely changed, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to the end of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable emptiness. — Haruki Murakami

Terri's death brings to a close a very tragic, human and personal event that has left everyone with a feeling of emptiness, regardless of what side of the issue you may have been on. — Bob Beauprez

Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever from that day forward is part of literature's profligate generosity. — Pat Conroy

The presence of the inner feeling of emptiness directs our attention to a past experience of guilt and to our inner feeling awareness of the cause in the past. We must be sensitive to that feeling and accept it in order to chase down the cause, ferret it out, reassess the value of the experience to us in order not to further project the blame in anger outward to an external cause. — Martha Char Love

If there is a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete and relative happiness such as we find in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

You know that day after day of, Oh God what am I going to do with myself feeling? The fear of the emptiness that it implies keeps me going. — Anish Kapoor

She mourned the history that the invisible intruder had erased, but not enough that she would spend a second more of her future feeling the emptiness. — Thomm Quackenbush

Namely, the feeling of the total and ultimate meaninglessness of their lives. They lack the awareness of a meaning worth living for. They are haunted by the experience of their inner emptiness, a void within themselves; they are caught in that situation which I have called the existential vacuum. — Viktor E. Frankl

The accursed ship didn't sink for a full three hours. By the time it did, I was feeling so traumatized that even watching Dogface die offered little consolation. The dialogue, the acting, the vast emptiness of the whole endeavour! Was that what passed for cinema these days? I felt like I have been violated; violated by a team of accountants. — Paul Murray

The deepest realization of meditation is that your being is a non-being. It is a nothing, a vast emptiness without boundaries. It is a no-self. The feeling of self, of "I" is false. — Swami Dhyan Giten

I don't know what I was looking for . . . I felt empty. I guess. Not hearing from you made it all seem surreal, like you were never there, a dream, a figment of my imagination.

I went to your site that day to . . . I guess, double-check.

I thought. . . maybe you wrote something, a new story . . . a message . . . anything.

I did find a new story . . .

It wasn't about us . . .

And I ended up feeling even emptier. — Stjepan Sejic

Whenever I see the alcove of a tastefully built Japanese room, I marvel at our comprehension of the secrets of shadows, our sensitive use of shadow and light. For the beauty of the alcove is not the work of some clever device. An empty space is marked off with plain wood and plain walls, so that the light drawn into its forms dim shadows within emptiness. There is nothing more. And yet, when we gaze into the darkness that gathers behind the crossbeam, around the flower vase, beneath the shelves, though we know perfectly well it is mere shadow, we are overcome with the feeling that in this small corner of the atmosphere there reigns complete and utter silence; that here in the darkness immutable tranquility holds sway. — Jun'ichiro Tanizaki

Suicidal pain includes the feeling that one has lost all capacity to effect emotional change. The agony is excruciating and looks as if it will never end. There is the feeling of having been beaten down for a very long time. There are feelings of agitation, emptiness, and incoherence. 'Snap out of it and get on with your life,' sounds like a demand to high jump ten feet. — David L. Conroy

When a third wave of poverty overwhelmed me, I knew with even greater certitude than when I had lived in Clerkenwell that the only complete solution to my problem was suicide. I never brought it off. I was afraid. A lifetime of never making positive decisions, accepting instead the lesser of the evils presented to me, had atrophied my will. It was not so much that I longed for death as that I didn't long for life. Emptiness, though, was not a sufficiently definite feeling to lead to a violent act. Instead of sitting in my room and balancing the relative convenience of various ways of ending it all, I ought to have been busy trying to summon up a reasonable amount of despair. Hopelessness was thinly spread like drizzle over my whole outlook. But, in an emergency, I could not find a puddle of despondency deep enough to drown in. — Quentin Crisp

Jesus knew what being rejected felt like. Jesus knew. He knew the feelings. He knew the struggles. And in an earth-shattering moment, Jesus exposed the way of escape for us. He matched every feeling - the emptiness, the deprivation, and the rejection - with truths straight from God's Word. Lies flee in the presence of truth. — Lysa TerKeurst

There are thousands of ragas, and they are all connected with different times of the day, like sunrise or night or sunset. It is all based on 72 of what we call 'mela' or scales. And we have principally nine moods, ranging from peacefulness to praying, or the feeling of emptiness you get by sitting by the ocean. — Ravi Shankar

Many of us, myself, included, considered our souls necessary collateral damage to get done the things we felt we simply had to get get done - because of other people's expectations, because we want to be know as highly capable, because we're trying to outrun an inner emptiness. And for a while we don't even realize the compromise we've made. We're on autopilot, chugging through the day on fear and caffeine, checking things off the list, falling into bed without even a real thought or feeling or connection all day long, just a sense of having made it through. — Shauna Niequist

He sounded like he might just as well have been off in the emptiness of some awful cold black hole, out there in the timeless infinity far beyond the reach of warmth and earthly human feeling — Angela Bowie

When you are so full that there is no emptiness in you, that you have started feeling the significance of the ordinary, day-to-day existence, when moment to moment you live totally, intensely, passionately, then God is available. — Rajneesh

This state of mind brings a contentment he never finds with any passive form of entertainment. Books, cinema, even music can't bring him to this. Working with others is one part of it, but it's not all. This benevolent dissociation seems to require difficulty, prolonged demands on concentration and skills, pressure, problems to be solved, even danger. He feels calm, and spacious, fully qualified to exist. It's a feeling of clarified emptiness, of deep, muted joy. — Ian McEwan

Only the cosmos inspired great feeling in him. Perhaps what he felt was love, but he'd never consciously named it. His was an all-consuming one-directional romance with the emptiness and the fullness of the entire universe. There was no room to spare, no time to waste on a lesser lover. He preferred it that way. The — Lily Brooks-Dalton

It's a bit like the feeling I get when I'm standing on a cliff or high building, looking down at a suicidal drop. I start thinking about what would happen if I stepped off, the rush of the fall, the shattering collision, the quiet emptiness of death. Part of me wants to experience the thrill of complete surrender ... — Darren Shan

she'd left, feeling the emptiness of the big theater — Anthony Doerr

The way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depends very much indeed on the kind of ideas that fill our minds. If they are mainly small, weak, superficial, and incoherent, life will appear insipid, uninteresting, petty, and chaotic. It is difficult to bear the resultant feeling of emptiness, and the vacuum of our minds may only too easily be filled by some big, fantastic notion - political or otherwise - which suddenly seem to illumine everything and to give meaning and purpose to our existence. It needs no emphasis that herein lies one of the great dangers of our time. — E.F. Schumacher

Look at the nuclear arms race as a vortex arising out of the greed of human beings who are isolated in their separate selves and do not feel the connection to other human beings. They are also feeling a peculiar emptiness and become greedy for everything they can get to fill themselves. Hence nuclear industries proliferate because they provide large amounts of money and the greed is so extensive that such people do not care what might happen from their actions. — David Shainberg

Did you know the average age of a gamer is thirty-two? Now, I don't see anything inherently wrong with diversion and games, but that is certainly telling about our culture, isn't it? Instead of raising families or creating culture, we are sitting around in our living rooms with our eyes glued to the television, simulating life. We are escapists, cowards, and thieves. We hide, occasionally stealing crumbs from the table of those living the good life. We are avoiding the truth that screams at us from the stillness: 'There is more. You are more than this.' So we anesthetize the truth with busyness. Maybe if we just do more, this feeling of emptiness will go away. And we won't actually have to do any real work. — Jeff Goins

Only a lover of animals will understand the sudden feeling of loss, of emptiness, and the intuitive bond which exists between man and dog, has always existed from the beginning and will, please God, continue to the end. — Daphne Du Maurier

If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to "win," how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all. — Martha Stout

When compared to the fact that he might very well be dead by this time tomorrow, whether he was courageous or not today was pointless, empty. When compared to the fact that he might be dead tomorrow, everything was pointless. It just didn't make any difference. It was pointless to the tree, it was pointless to every man in his outfit, pointless to everybody in the whole world. Who cared? It was not pointless only to him; and when he was dead, when he ceased to exist, it would be pointless to him too. More important: Not only would it be pointless, it would have been pointless all along.
This was an obscure and rather difficult point to grasp. Understanding of it kept slipping in and out on the edges of his mind. It flickered, changing its time sense and tenses. At those moments when he understood it, it left him with a very hollow feeling. — James Jones

How can my old photographs fail to create in me a feeling of emptiness and sorrow? They make me acutely aware that this second deprivation will be final this time ... — Claude Levi-Strauss

He never had a positive feeling of love towards any of them, however. He just went with them and had sex with them. They filled each other's emptiness. Strange as it may seem, he never once felt a strong emotional attraction to any of the women who had a strong emotional attraction to him. — Haruki Murakami

death of a child or a brother or a sister, one may half-waken, thinking of that person with that same lost emptiness, that feeling of places which may never be filled . . . perhaps not even in death? — Stephen King

Surrounding the two of them was the love they shared but also an overwhelming feeling of fear
fear of a future filled with the emptiness which would consume them if they remained apart. A fear of a future of being separated forever, and it gripped both of their hearts, demanding preventative action. — Madison Thorne Grey

When the fight ends you can afford to relax. That's the worst part. Winner or loser you have again eyes to see around you. Blood, butchered bodies, bodies pierced by arrows. You stir inside, your heart tightens, the feeling of loss wells up. The sense of smell is the next thing to revive, adding a new dimension of pain. I closed the eyes of the last cadet, blue eyes, unseeing, his body, so small, almost a child, the youngest cadets were all gone, their faces surprised in death. Cold lips never able again to kiss a girl. It's then that the emptiness swallows you and you mourn inside. Damn you, Scharon. No! Damn you, Travellers. — Florian Armas

Whenever we feel the absence of peace - whenever our unmet longing for joy expresses itself as anxiety, or depression, or fear, or anger, or enslavement to any number of defeating sin patterns or addictions - the emptiness we're feeling and trying to fill is for what our relationship with God, by His loving choice, was always meant to be. Our angst comes from the underlying implications of Ecclesiastes 3:11, where the Scripture says God has put eternity into man's heart. — Matt Chandler

When one begins to purposefully perform acts of kindness, the spirit changes and soon doing good deeds becomes a focal point for our life; doing good begins to be the same as feeling good. The periods of emptiness when we search for the "meaning of it all" begin to fill with acts of kindness. — Gary Blair

I'll make love with them in their houses or in the woods, I'll feel a certain degree of pleasure, but the moment I reach orgasm, the feeling of emptiness will return. — Paulo Coelho

I am miserable now - not feeling unhappiness, just lack of life coming to me and coming out of me - resignation to getting nothing and seeking nothing, staying behind shell. The glare of unknown love, human, unhad by me, - the tenderness I never had. I don't want to be just a nothing, a sick blank, withdrawal into myself forever. I just want something, beside the emptiness I've carried around in me all my life. — Allen Ginsberg

Everybody pays the heart lip service, of course, but everybody is more familiar with the absence of love than with its presence and gets so used to the feeling of emptiness that it becomes "normal." You don't miss the foundation of feeling until you begin to look for your self and can't find a support in the affects for a self. — Saul Bellow

When you're missing a peice of yourself, aching, gut wrenching emptiness begins to take over. Until you find the link that completes your very soul, the feeling will never go away. Most people find a way to fill this void, material possessions, a string of relationships, affairs, food ... I bare my soul, with words, for all to see. — Jennifer Salaiz

I've always been a very restless person. I work hard, spend too much time looking after my son, I dance like a mad thing, I learned calligraphy. I go to courses on selling, I read one book after another. But that's all a way of avoiding those moments when nothing is happening, because those blank spaces give me a feeling of absolute emptiness, in which not a single crumb of love exists. — Paulo Coelho

Deep down, we all have our dark thoughts, Kathy. Mine are no different than any others. My life was planned for me, like my body was engineered to be what it is, a Prime Elite. But underneath it all I am still a man. Though I did not want this bonding at the beginning, it is now a part of me . . . and a part of you. We will work things out, my wife and we will do it together, that is what I accept. Also," he adjusted his arm around her, feeling her discomfort. "I know that without you there is an emptiness that I cannot put into words. It is an emptiness that I will not live with. Thus, I do not wish to be free of you . . . ever. — K.L. Tharp

The feeling of emptiness is a pre-existing condition. Jargon forces intimacy. — Rae Armantrout

This afternoon held that special quality of mournful emptiness I've connected with late Sunday afternoons ever since childhood: the feeling of having nothing to do. — Margaret Atwood

Of all the scary and supernatural things I came across during that particularly strange period of my life, he was without a doubt the most mysterious. There was something in his behaviour so striking, and yet so uncontrollable and intoxicating that I couldn't help being attracted to him like a magnet. When he wasn't present, it was as if my body would forget to breathe and my heart to beat. Mentally and physically I missed him, and a resulting feeling of emptiness was digging inside of me almost like suffering a slow chemical poison that I wasn't able to stop. — Sara Lunardi

The feeling of emptiness is usually a sign that we have put our trust in something that can't sustain us. It reminds us that we were created to trust in our heavenly Father and nothing else. We were created to enjoy the many things God gives without making them the center of our lives. When we confuse the two, our lives feel out of kilter. To feel better, we try again and search for love apart from God, but when we finally realize that it is elusive, we forsake the quest and quietly despair. Keep probing. Life is ultimately about God. — Edward T. Welch

He knows as well as I do what the Why is. It's everything changing when I was ten. It's the bullying and the fear. So much fear of everything, but mostly death. Sudden, out-of-the-blue death. It's also me being terrified of life. It's the giant emptiness in my chest. It's touching my face or my skin and feeling nothing. This is the Why of me staying home in the first place. And the Why of me eating. And the Why of me ending up here. But that doesn't mean I want to die. — Jennifer Niven

At the ending of the day when I'm weary after a waterfall of tears have all been cried - and I'm feeling like the skies will always be dreary - nothing's there to fill the emptiness inside. — Ellen M. DuBois

I am unable to describe exactly what is the matter with me; now and then there are horrible fits of anxiety, apparently without cause, or otherwise a feeling of emptiness and fatigue in the head. — Vincent Van Gogh

Why does the feeling of emptiness occupy so much space? — James De La Vega

There ARE people who won't customarily eat an entire row of cookies, or hear food calling their name from other rooms, or who don't grind up food in the garbage disposal for fear of eating it, or get it back out of the garbage so they could eat it. Of course, my binge eating was just a cover-up for the larger issue: Trying to fill the emptiness — SARK

When a child receives the message, even subtly or indirectly, that his emotions don't matter, he will grow up feeling, somewhere deep inside, that he himself doesn't matter. — Jonice Webb

I somehow make it through the first month. I dress and brush my teeth when they tell me to. And I experience the hollow feeling of complete loss, which is emptiness. — Holly Goldberg Sloan

He had surrendered to it, on a few rare occasions through the years, with women he had thought he liked. He had been left feeling an angry emptiness - because he had sought an act of triumph, though he had not known of what nature, but the response he received was only a woman's acceptance of a casual pleasure, and he knew too clearly that what he had won had no meaning. He was left, not with a sense of attainment, but with a sense of his own degradation. He grew to hate his desire. He fought it. He came to believe the doctrine that this desire was wholly physical, a desire, not of consciousness, but of matter, and he rebelled against the thought that his flesh could be free to choose and that its choice was impervious to the will of his mind. — Ayn Rand

Human life must be some kind of mistake. The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of needs and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even when they are satisfied, all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing remains to him but abandonment to boredom. This is direct proof that existence has no
real value in itself; for what is boredom but the feeling of the emptiness of life? If life - the craving for which is the very essence of our being - were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing. — Arthur Schopenhauer

But there was still something missing. Something that nagged at her-an emptiness she couldn't explain. There were mornings she woke with her heart pounding wildly and the sensation of arms wrapped around her. But the feeling slipped away the moment she opened her eyes, and no matter how quickly she squeezed them shut, she couldn't recapture the contentment she'd felt. — Kirsten Miller

It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Guilt is the sum total of: All the negative feelings we have ever had about ourselves! Any form of self-hatred, self-rejection, feelings of worthlessness, sinfulness, inferiority, incompetence, failure, or emptiness. The feeling that there are things in us that are lacking or missing or incomplete. — Kenneth Wapnick