Quotes & Sayings About Hollow Man

The rifle and the pistol are still the equalizer when one man is more of a man than another, and if ... he is really smart ... he will get a permit to carry one and then drop around to Abercrombie and Fitch and buy himself a .22 caliber Colt automatic pistol, 'Woodsman model', with a five-inch barrel and a box of shells. I advise him to get lubricated hollow points to avoid jams and to ensure a nice expansion on the bullet. He might even get several boxes and practice a little ... — Ernest Hemingway,

To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man. — Matthew Arnold

Hollow Horn Bear knew that to be leader and adviser of his people he must be honest and reliable, and that his word once given in promise must never be taken back. He knew that he must be a man of will-power, standing for the right no matter what happened to him personally; that he must have strength of purpose, allowing no influence to turn him from doing what was best for the tribe. He must be willing to serve his people without thought of pay. He must be utterly unselfish and kind-hearted to the old and poor and stand ready to give to those in need. Above all, he must be unafraid to deal equal justice to all. — Luther Standing Bear

There is an empty space in my heart. It weighs me down and each step I take through life gets harder and harder, I realize now that I am no longer the man she once knew, but a bitter and hollow replica of him, unworthy of her love. — Inger Iversen

East Hollow is full of tormented souls.' I remark, only to hear his chuckle, his eyes moving forward just in time to step out of the way of a wayward man with armfuls of carrier bags.
'Now that is the attraction. — Charlotte Munro

[Buddhism and Christianity] are in one sense parallel and equal; as a mound and a hollow, as a valley and a hill. There is a sense in which that sublime despair is the only alternative to that divine audacity. It is even true that the truly spiritual and intellectual man sees it as sort of dilemma; a very hard and terrible choice. There is little else on earth that can compare with these for completeness. And he who does not climb the mountain of Christ does indeed fall into the abyss of Buddha. — G.K. Chesterton

How were friendship possible? In mutual devotedness to the good and true; otherwise impossible, except as armed neutrality or hollow commercial league. A man, be the heavens ever praised, is sufficient for himself; yet were ten men, united in love, capable of being and of doing what ten thousand singly would fail in. Infinite is the help man can yield to man. — Thomas Carlyle

'Tis solitude should teach us how to die; It hath no flatterers; vanity can give, No hollow aid; alone - man with God must strive. — Lord Byron

Now the Spirit of the Cave Lion wants me to leave." She looked up at the tall man beside her. "Do you think we'll ever come back?" "No," he said. There was a hollow ring to his voice. He was looking in the small cave, but he was seeing another place and another time. "Even if you go back to the same place, it's not the same. — Jean M. Auel

As Roran watched, the man's arms, neck, and chest shriveled, and his bones appeared in sharp relief-from the bowlike curve of his collarbones to the hollow saddle of his hips, where his stomach hung like an empty waterskin. His lips puckered and drew back farther than they were intended to over his yellow teeth, baring them in a grisly snarl, while his eyeballs deflated as if they were engorged ticks being squished empty of blood, and the surrounding flesh sank inward. — Christopher Paolini

Only slowly, after long watching, did he begin to distinguish the small signs that made them trackable: the ball of gristle in the corner of a man's cheek, which you could actually hear the soft click of if you listened for it; the swelling of the wormlike vein in a man's temple just below the hairline, the tightening of the crow's feet round his eyes, the almost imperceptible flicker of pinkish, naked lids; a deepening of the hollow above a man's collarbone as his throat muscles tenses, and some word he was holding back, because it was unspeakable, went up and down there, a lump of something he could neither swallow nor cough up.He saw these things now, and what astonished him was how much they gave away. — David Malouf

O my vanity I am an arrogant man, is this weakness, is it just a dream of power? Must I betray myself for a seat on the council? Is this sensible and wise or is it hollow and self-loving? I don't even know if the Grandee is sincere. Does he know? Perhaps not even he. I am weak and he's strong, the offer gives him many ways of ruining me. But I, too, have much to gain. The souls of the city, of the world, surely they are worth three angels? Is Allah so unbending that he will not embrace three more to save the human race? — Salman Rushdie

And on and on it went-that duet between the dumb, praying lady and the big, hollow man who was so full of loving echoes. — Kurt Vonnegut

When business is not all that it should be there is a temptation to sit back and say, Well, what's the use! We've done everything possible to stir up a little business and there is nothing doing so what's the use of trying! There is always a way. There was a way in and there is a way out. And success comes to the man who grits his teeth, squares his jaw, and says, There is a way for me and, by jingo, I'll find it. The stagnator gathers green scum, finally dries up and leaves an unsightly hollow. — Cliff Sloan

How hollow is the heart of man, and how full of excrement! — Blaise Pascal

Nell turned to the stretcher, took a deep breath, and peered down at the unconscious war hero. Immediately, a painful hollow feeling grew inside her, and her heart swelled with emotions from a time gone by. Even with the thick bandage across his eyes, she recognised this man. It was Jack Montgomery. Her pulse boomed as she paled with sickness. She gripped her wedding ring nervously, twisting it around and around. — LeeAnn Whitaker

Never mind the creepy eyes peeking in our windows at night, and following our every move as we drove around. No, that was all good, but stalking us in a grocery story? Line crossed, man. — Brandy Nacole

A vital Christian, radiating that hidden beauty of the heart, is more attractive to the right sort of Christian man (the only kind you want) than the raving beauty who is hollow within. A woman who is developing her domestic abilities, who is reasonably attractive, and who is a vital Christian in her own right is an irresistible person. — Jay E. Adams

Nothing happened for a whole day. Then, in a little hollow on the edge of the brooding hill, a few grains of sand shifted and left a tiny hole.

Something emerged. Something invisible. Something joyful and selfish and marvellous. Something as intangible as an idea, which is exactly what it was. A wild idea.

It was old in a way not measurable by any calendar known to Man and what it had, right now, was memories and needs. It remembered life, in other times and other universes. It needed people.

It rose against the stars, changing shape, coiling like smoke.

There were lights on the horizon.

It liked lights.

It regarded them for a few seconds and then, like an invisible arrow, extended itself towards the city and sped away.

It liked action, too . . . — Terry Pratchett

Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself. He will be a man whose life or death can be lightly decided with no sense of human affinity, in the most fortunate of cases, on the basis of a pure judgment of utility. It is in this way that one can understand the double sense of the term "extermination camp," and it is now clear what we seek to express with the phrase: "to lie on the bottom. — Primo Levi

I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hallowness,
the futility of the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd
seemingly the leading actor of the piece ;
but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind.
I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.
He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of sahib.
For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the "natives", and so in every crises he has got to do what the "natives" expect of him. — George Orwell

Oh, father's gone to market-town, he was up before the day,
And Jamie's after robins, and the man is making hay,
And whistling down the hollow goes the boy that minds the mill,
While mother from the kitchen door is calling with a will,
"Polly!-Polly!-
The cows are in the corn!
Oh, where's Polly?" — Richard Watson Gilder

It is not poverty so much as pretense that harasses a ruined man - the struggle between a proud mind and an empty purse - the keeping up of a hollow show that must soon come to an end. — Washington Irving

She held him at arms' length, looked at the pipe still gripped inn his hand, then looked at his face and read him like a book. She ran the tip of her red tongue slowly across her full cushiony, sensuous lips, making them wet-red and looked him straight in the eyes with her own glassy, speckled bedroom eyes.

The man drowned.

When he came up, he stared back, passion cocked, his whole black being on a live-wire edge. Ready! Solid ready to cut throats, crack skulls, dodge police, steal hearses, drink muddy water, live in a hollow log, and take any rape-fiend chance to be once more in the arms of his high-yellow heart. — Chester Himes

Now journeys were not simple matters for Grace; nothing is simple if your mind is a fetch-and-carry wanderer from sliced perilous outer world to secret safe inner world; if when night comes your thought creeps out like a furred animal concealed in the dark, to fine, seize, and kill its food and drag it back to the secret house in the secret world, only to discover that the secret world has disappeared or has so enlarged that it's a public nightmare; if then strange beasts walk upside down like flies on the ceiling; crimson wings flap, the curtains fly; a sad man wearing a blue waistcoat with green buttons sits in the centre of the room, crying because he has swallowed the mirror and it hurts and he burps in flashes of glass and light; if crakes move and cry; the world is flipped, unrolled down in the vast marble stair; a stained threadbare carpet; the hollow silver dancing shoes, hunting-horns ... — Janet Frame

Silently we went round and round,
And through each hollow mind
The memory of dreadful things
Rushed like a dreadful wind,
And horror stalked before each man,
And terror crept behind. — Oscar Wilde

Aeneas comes to her court a suppliant, impoverished and momentarily timid. He is a good-looking man. If anything, his scars emphasize that. The aura of his divine failure wraps around him like a cloak. Dido feels the tender contempt of the strong for the unlucky, but this is mixed with something else, a hunger that worms through her bones and leaves them hollow, to be filled with fire. — Kij Johnson

I was young at Myna, that first time. When had the change come? He had retreated to here, to Collegium, to spin his awkward webs of intrigue and to lecture at the College. Then, years on, the call had come for action. He had gone to that chest in which he stored his youth and found that, like some armour long unworn, it had rusted away.
He tried to tell himself that this was not like the grumbling of any other man who finds the prime of his life behind him. I need my youth and strength now, as never before. A shame that one could no husband time until one needed it. All his thoughts rang hollow. He was past his best and that was the thorn that would not be plucked from his side. He was no different from any tradesman or scholar who, during a life of indolence, pauses partway up the stairs to think, This was not so hard, yesterday. — Adrian Tchaikovsky

Loden loves guns, loves to talk about them. Right now he's trying to talk about them with me, a distinctly trying experience for I keep shepherding the conversation back to dead bodies which Loden clearly doesn't enjoy very much. You would think that a man who felt comfortable extolling the virtues of hollow point bullets ("Expands to twice its size and just thumps that person.") would be okay talking about dead bodies, but apparently not. "You just cringe," he said when I mentioned the prospect of shooting into human cadaver tissue. Then he made a noise that I transcribed in my notes as olllggg. — Mary Roach

What, no wine?" said Dantes, turning pale, and looking alternately at the hollow cheeks of the old man and the empty cupboards. "What, no wine? Have you wanted money, father? — Alexandre Dumas

Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it
namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign. — Mark Twain

When the voices of democracy are silenced, freedom becomes a hollow concept. No man or woman should be sentenced to the shadows of silence for something he or she has said or written. — Al Neuharth

We do not really know what draws a human being out into the world. Is it curiosity? A hunger for experience? An addiction to wonderment? The man who ceases to be astonished is hollow, possessed of an extinguished heart. If he believes that everything has already happened, that he has seen it all, then something most precious has died within him - the delight in life. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

And then the man whom Sorrow named his friend,
Sought once again the shore, and found a shell,
And thought, I will my heavy story tell
Till my own words, re-echoing, shall send
Their sadness through a hollow, pearly heart;
And my own tale again for me shall sing,
And my own whispering words be comforting,
And lo! my ancient burden may depart.
Then he sang softly nigh the pearly rim;
But the sad dweller by the sea-ways lone
Changed all he sang to inarticulate moan
Among her wildering whirls, forgetting him.
-from The Sad Shepherd — W.B.Yeats

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

I had decided after 'Hollow Man' to stay away from science fiction. I felt I had done so much science fiction. Four of the six movies I made in Hollywood are science-fiction oriented, and even 'Basic Instinct' is kind of science fiction. — Paul Verhoeven

When Scout finds Boo Radley hiding behind her bedroom door, she says something that is scary because it is calm. Something like, "Why, there's the man right there, Mr. Tate." Or whatever his name is. Scout's not surprised to find a hollow-eyed monster in the form of Robert Duvall behind her door. She opens a line into magic, possibility. Or mystery, that's a better word than magic. Like an open hole in the ground no one noticed until Scout pointed it out, a place where men with dark secrets live behind every bedroom door. Scout's calm voice says, "The rest of you are blind. — Samantha Hunt

I liked the idea of a person shedding their life, and someone else putting it on.
-Oliver Harris on writing The Hollow Man for Crime Time online magazine — Oliver Harris

Hawk's belly sunk hollow, black and empty, much like his chest that corroded desire into something nasty and wrong. Hawk paced until his knees creaked, glaring down at his phone like he could reach through and touch what he was forbidden to want. — V. Theia

As a great deal of flesh would have been needed to make a fat man of him, his frame being so large, he was not fat; his face was a large framework too, looking, by the smallness of the features and the glow in the hollow of the cheek, more fitted to withstand assaults of the weather than to express sentiments and emotions, or to respond to them in others. — Virginia Woolf

There is a deep urge in man to know things which are worthless, to know things which make you feel special - because only you know those things and nobody else does. Man wants to be special, and nothing makes you more special than so-called esoteric knowledge. That is why esoteric knowledge remains important. All kinds of rubbish go on in the name of esoteric knowledge - that the earth is hollow, that inside the earth there are great civilizations. And there are people who still believe in it, and in many more such stories. — Osho

Anxiety, the other characteristic of modern man, is even more basic than emptiness and loneliness. For being "hollow" and lonely would not bother us except that it makes us prey to that peculiar psychological pain and turmoil called anxiety. — Rollo May

The man who ceases to be astonished is hollow, possessed of an extinguished heart. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

According to the Yogis, there are three principal nerve currents: one they call the Ida, the other the Pingala, and the middle one the Sushumna, and all these are inside the spinal column. The Ida and the Pingala, the left and the right, are clusters of nerves, while the middle one, the Sushumna, is hollow and is not a cluster of nerves. This Sushumna is closed, and for the ordinary man is of no use, for he works through the Ida and the Pingala only. Currents are continually going down and coming up through these nerves, carrying orders all over the body through other nerves running to the different organs of the body. The task before us is vast; and first and foremost, we must seek to control the vast mass of sunken thoughts which have become automatic with us. The evil deed is, no doubt, on the conscious plane; but the cause which produced the evil deed was far beyond in the realms of the unconscious, — Swami Vivekananda

A hollow edifice erected for the habitation of man, rat, mouse, beetle, cockroach, fly, mosquito, flea, bacillus, and microbe. — Ambrose Bierce

I've lived on borrowed time. More than any man deserves. I've seen wonders beyond my wildest imaginings. Through these centuries, against the impossibility that we'd find each other, we did. And I am most grateful for it. — Sleepy Hollow Press

Hollow then produced Kobel's tax returns for the past three years.
When Ringling objected, Hollow said to Judge Rollins, "Your Honor, a man who files a tax return is of sound mind."
"That's debatable," said the ultraconservative judge, drawing laughter from the courtroom. — Jeffery Deaver

The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal. — James Thurber

We call this a state of childishness, but it is the same poor hollow mockery of it, that death is of sleep. Where, in the dull eyes of doating men, are the laughing light and life of childhood, the gaiety that has known no check, the frankness that has felt no chill, the hope that has never withered, the joys that fade in blossoming? Where, in the sharp lineaments of rigid and unsightly death, is the calm beauty of slumber, telling of rest for the waking hours that are past, and gentle hopes and loves for those which are to come? Lay death and sleep down, side by side, and say who shall find the two akin. Send forth the child and childish man together, and blush for the pride that libels our own old happy state, and gives its title to an ugly and distorted image. — Charles Dickens

It was uncanny. You press a button and a man drops dead a hundred meters away. It seemed hollow and remote, falsifying everything. It was a trick of the lenses. The man is an accurate picture. Then he is upside down. Then he is right side up. You shoot at a series of images conveyed to you through a metal tube. The force of a death should be enormous but how can you know what kind of man you've killed or who was the braver and stronger if you have to peer through layers of glass that deliver the image but obscure the meaning of the act? War has a conscience or it's ordinary murder. — Don DeLillo

Love was a bitch because it shackled you as hard as steel cuffs, leaving you gasping and hollow for any connection. — V. Theia

She found a small picture made entirely of feathers and was trying to decide whether it depicted a monkey climbing up the back of a man - or possibly a person climbing a flight of stairs or perhaps a cow next to a tree, when she saw a chess piece, sitting by itself on a small pedestal.
It was the white queen, carved from ivory. She stood with a regal frown, her body shadowed by the enormous crown that bloomed on her head. The crown was a hollow sphere, exquisitely carved with open work, and when Jemma peered inside she saw inside another sphere, also open, and inside that, yet another. — Eloisa James

They took 3-D digital photographs of my entire body. I had to pose stark naked, assuming a kind of Spider-Man position. After a minute, one of the technicians pointed to my genitals and said, Um, we're not getting enough data there ... It wasn't what you think. It turns out that the fancy digital camera doesn't pick up dark areas too well, and they were having trouble because of the hair down there. I actually had to spray on this highlighter stuff. (On having digital photos taken for the invisible man role in the film Hollow Man) — Kevin Bacon

The politician is the poorest man in the world, the most empty man, the most hollow - stuffed with straw and nothing else. — Osho

That was how his pen finally designed his sculpture; in the center the weak,
confused, arrogant, soon to be destroyed young man holding cup a loft, behind him the idyllic child, clear-eyed, munching his grapes, symbol of joy
; between them the tiger skin. The Bacchus, hollow within himself, flabby, reeling, already old; the Satyr,
eternally young and gay, symbol of man's childhood and naughty innocence — Irving Stone

A few moments later the back door of one of the bungalows opened, and a figure in a broad-striped bathing suit flung down the paddock, cleared the stile, rushed through the tussock grass into the hollow, staggered up the sandy hillock, and raced for dear life over the big porous stones, over the cold, wet pebbles, on to the hard sand that gleamed like oil. Splish-Splosh! Splish-Splosh! The water bubbled round his legs as Stanley Burnell waded out exulting. First man in as usual! He'd beaten them all again. And he swooped down to souse his head and neck. "Hail, — Katherine Mansfield

There is a hollow empty feeling that a man can have when he is waked too early in the morning that is almost like the feeling of disaster and he had this multiplied a thousand times. — Ernest Hemingway,

You have been spying all along," Conrad said, unconvinced. "The manhunt for you was a ruse."
"Check with the emperor," Ferrin replied coolly.
... "That will not take long," said a man in the corner, studiously picking at a fingernail with a small knife. He raised his head, wavy gray hair framing his pallid face. He wore a long coat of brown leather.
"Torvic!" Ferrin called, the exuberance hollow. "I hadn't seen you over there. Still in touch directly with Felrook? You know, to come clean, I haven't brought Maldor in on my plan yet, so it might be of little use to bother him at this juncture. — Brandon Mull

What, man, do you mistake the hollow sky For a thronged tavern ... ? — John Keats

Sicarius padded toward the exit, his soft black boots silent on the tile floor. He paused in the doorway and glanced at the backs of the two older men.
The emperor emitted a nervous chuckle. "You trained him too well, Hollow. The man bothers me."
"He is loyal."
"I know. You did a good job. I ought to give you Sespian to work with. The boy is disappointing."
"He does seem soft," Hollowcrest said.
"Did you hear that scream? I would've been fascinated by severed heads at that age."
"You're fascinated with them now, Sire."
"True enough."
They shared a laugh and headed for the door. Sicarius slipped away before they noticed him. — Lindsay Buroker

Below on the beach, the surf also seemed the same, although the sea was more transparent. In the light of day, the hollow formed by the terrace and the cave seemed as tiny as a nest. They themselves were merely a man and a woman lost in the immensity. — Marek Halter

Claude, saddened and discouraged in his human affections, by all this, had flung himself eagerly into the arms of learning, that sister which, at least does not laugh in your face, and which always pays you, though in money that is sometimes a little hollow, for the attention which you have paid to her. Hence, he became more and more learned, and, at the same time, as a natural consequence, more and more rigid as a priest, more and more sad as a man. — Victor Hugo

Balt Van Tassel was an easy indulgent soul; he loved his daughter better even than his pipe, and, like a reasonable man and an excellent father, let her have her way in everything. — Washington Irving

Experiencing the present purely is being emptied and hollow; you catch the grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall. — Annie Dillard

Bread baked without love is a bitter bread that feeds but half a man's hunger, - those who cannot work with their hearts achieve but a hollow, half-hearted success that breeds bitterness all around. If you are a writer who would secretly prefer to be a lawyer or a doctor, your written words will feed but half the hunger of your readers; if you are a teacher who would rather be a businessman, your instructions will meet but half the need for knowledge of your students; if you are a scientist who hates science, your performance will satisfy but half the needs of your mission. — A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

I cried then, holding nothing back. For empty years, yearning for the touch of a hand. Hollow years, lying beside a man I had betrayed, for whom I had no tenderness. For the terrors and doubts and griefs of the day. Cried for him and me and for Mary MacNab, who knew what loneliness was - and what love was, as well. — Diana Gabaldon

What we love is too much in the past, consists too much in the time that we have spent together for us to require the whole woman; we wish only to be sure that it is she, not to be mistaken as to her identity, a thing far more important than beauty to those who are in love; her cheeks may grow hollow, her body thin, even to those who were originally most proud, in the eyes of the world, of their domination over beauty, that little tip of a nose, that sign in which is summed up the permanent personality of a woman, that algebraical formula, that constant, is sufficient to prevent a man who is courted in the highest society and is in love with her from being free upon a single evening because he is spending his evenings in brushing and entangling, until it is time to go to bed, the hair of the woman whom he loves, or simply in staying by her side, so that he may be with her or she with him, or merely that she may not be with other people. — Marcel Proust

MAN AND WOMAN

Man is a like a desert without the rain of a woman. Nothing can be born and grown without her nourishment. She is a life-giving river that gives and loves without holding anything back. And without her water, man would walk around aimlessly, feeling incomplete and hollow like an empty well. The longer he roams, the deeper the hole within his soul expands, growing bigger and bigger like a barren tree whose branches resemble the cracks on hard, dry soil. And he shall continue to feel incomplete and malnourished, until he encounters a godly woman. To show him life and quench his thirst. — Suzy Kassem

It wasn't disgust she felt for Karou, not anymore; it was indignation. Incredulity. A man like Akiva crosses worlds to find you, infiltrates the enemy capital just to dance with you, bends heaven and hell to avenge your death, saves your comrade and kin from torture and death, and you send him off looking gut-punched, diminished, carved hollow? — Laini Taylor

When a man is physically present but emotionally absent, a girl's heart can feel quite hollow and helpless. This is true whether that man is her father, her husband, or even a man whom she deeply respects. — Lysa TerKeurst

Squatting upon the floor of the room, without any perceptible effort he passed into the hollow of his hand the contents of the rectum ... ," wrote the anonymous writer's physician in a letter printed in one of Fletcher's books. "The excreta were in the form of nearly round balls," and left no stain on the hand. "There was no more odour to it than there is to a hot biscuit." So impressive, so clean, was the man's residue that his physician was inspired to set it aside as a model to aspire to. Fletcher adds in a footnote that "similar [dried] specimens have been kept for five years without change," hopefully at a safe distance from the biscuits. — Mary Roach

Soft hearts provide poor harbor; tin hearts can better stand against time and bad weather, thin and hollow as they are. So you pray to change from flesh to metal, and the dying Author of the world hears your plea and performs his final miracle. He lays His hand on you and then He vanishes. And what mortal man can undo that? What human on this earth has the power to change a tin man back to flesh? — Dexter Palmer

The king lifted a hand to her cheek and kissed her. It was not a kiss between strangers, not even a kiss between a bride and groom. It was a kiss between a man and his wife, and when it was over, the king closed his eyes and rested his forehead in the hollow of the queen's shoulder, like a man seeking respite, like a man reaching home at the end of the day. — Megan Whalen Turner

All these, however, were mere terrors of the night, phantoms of the mind that walk in darkness; and though he had seen many spectres in his time, and been more than once beset by Satan in divers shapes, in his lonely pre-ambulations, yet daylight put an end to all these evils; and he would have passed a pleasent life of it, in despite of the devil and all his works, if his path had not been crossed by a being that causes more perplexity to mortal man than ghosts, goblins, and the whole race of witches put together, and that was - a woman. — Washington Irving

Vultures pick the meat clean off a bone. Guilt eats at the marrow, leaving a man hollow. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Earthly riches are like the reed. Its roots are sunk in the swamp, and its exterior is fair to behold; but inside it is hollow. If a man leans on such a reed, it will snap off and pierce his soul. — Anthony Of Padua

Mr. Elliot is a man without heart or conscience; a designing, wary, cold-blooded being, who thinks only of himself; who, for his own interest or ease, would be guilty of any cruelty, or any treachery, that could be perpetrated without risk of his general character. He has no feeling for others. Those whom he has been the chief cause of leading into ruin, he can neglect and desert without the slightest compunction. He is totally beyond the reach of any sentiment of justice or compassion. Oh! he is black at heart, hollow and black! — Jane Austen