Quotes & Sayings About Vacancy

Old politicians, like old actors, revive in the limelight. The vacancy which afflicts them in private momentarily lifts when, oncemore, they feel the eyes of an audience upon them. Their old passion for holding the centre of the stage guides their uncertain footsteps to where the footlights shine, and summons up a wintry smile when the curtain rises. — Malcolm Muggeridge

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

My wife is - in the strictest sense - my sole companion, and I need no other. There is no vacancy in my mind any more than in my heart. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Now." After Ifemelu hung up, still amused, she decided to change the title of her blog to Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black. Job Vacancy in America - National Arbiter in Chief of "Who Is Racist" In America, racism exists but racists are all gone. Racists belong to the past. Racists are the thin-lipped mean white people in the movies about the civil rights era. Here's the thing: the manifestation of racism has changed but the language has not. So if you haven't — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

All my life, as down an abyss without a bottom. I have been pouring van loads of information into that vacancy of oblivion I call my mind. — Logan Pearsall Smith

I used to feel like this all the time and it didn't bother me, but it's different now. ( ... )
... and besides, I want to test them. I have been the third wheel in this friendship for around ten years. They have no idea who I really am. It's the exact opposite to my friendship with Flo. All these years I've passed off their lack of interest in me as an innocent vacancy, but it's now feeling more like selfishness. I don't belong here. — Dawn O'Porter

No one stands on the top of the world. Not you, not me, not even gods. But the unbearable vacancy of the throne in the sky is over. From now on ... I will be sitting on it. — Tite Kubo

Then she thought bitterly that it would be much easier to resist chocolate if her life were less stressful. — J.K. Rowling

The gap between rich and poor under President Obama is getting bigger because fewer well-paying jobs are available. Corporations are being taxed to the hilt and are loathe to add more workers. Thus, salaries fall because there are more than enough applicants to fill any job vacancy. — Bill O'Reilly

The present mood in which they sat relaxed was nothing more than the relief of two people coming back to a bombed building once familiar, shared as a dwelling, and finding all over the smashed foundations a rose-ash haze of willow herb. No more, no less. It is a ruin; but suspense at least, at least the need for sterile resolution, have evaporated with the fact of the return. Terror of nothingness contracts before the contemplation of it. It is not, after all, vacancy, but space; an area razed, roped off by time; by time refertilized, sown with a transfiguration, a ruin-haunting, ghost-spun No Man's crop of grace. — Rosamond Lehmann

Few people realize the immensity of vacancy. — H.G.Wells

If there is any thing which may properly be called happiness here below, I am persuaded it is in the union of two persons who love each other with perfect liberty, who are united by a secret inclination, and satisfied with each other's merit; their hearts are full and leave no vacancy for any other passion; they enjoy perpetual tranquillity, because they enjoy content — Heloise D'Argenteuil

Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe swims. — H.G.Wells

When you marry your mistress, you create a job vacancy. — James Goldsmith

You can always tell employees of the government by the total vacancy which occupies the space where most other people have faces. — John Kennedy Toole

Would the realization of Sukhvinder's desperation lead, at last, to some crack in her mother's implacable disapproval, her disappointment, her endless stone-faced criticism? — J.K. Rowling

Choice was dangerous: you had to forgo all other possibilities when you chose. — J.K. Rowling

It is one thing to speak of embracing the new, the fresh, the strange. It is another to feel that one is an insect, crawling across a page of the Encyclopedia Britannica, knowing only that something vast is passing by beneath, all without your sensing more than a yawning vacancy. — Gregory Benford

An intolerable pain pierced him. He was totally lost without her ... estranged from his life utterly, and from the world. This was the world into which he'd been born; the only world he would ever know. Yet nowhere in it did he feel the slightest degree at home. She was his home ... his one sanctuary upon earth ... the only place of safety for him in the whole universe. But he had lost her ... and consequently was doomed to absolute loneliness in an alien, frozen vacancy ... at the mercy of something huge, insensate and merciless as an eclipse ... For a moment his isolation was so agonisingly intense that it seemed impossible to go on living. He longed only to plunge into the black pit of annihilation opening before him. — Anna Kavan

Personally, I think the "Potter" books have too many adverbs and not enough sex. — Lev Grossman

His eyes held the confident vacancy that comes from the exercise of other people's power. — Ross Macdonald

What surprised me about 'The Casual Vacancy' was not just how good it was, but the particular way in which it was good. — Lev Grossman

They would set their course toward it, seeing it grow bigger silently and imperceptibly, a motionless growth
and then, when they were at it, when they were about to bang their noses with a shock against its seeming solid mass, the sun would dim. Wraiths of mist suddenly moving like serpents of the air would coil about them for a second. Grey damp would be around them, and the sun, a copper penny, would fade away. The wings next to their own wings would shade into vacancy, until each bird was a lonely sound in cold annihilation, a presence after uncreation. And there they would hang in chartless nothing, seemingly without speed or left or right or top or bottom, until as suddenly as ever the copper penny glowed and the serpents writhed. — T.H. White

If in an actor there appears an utter vacancy of meaning, a frigid equality, a stupid languor, a torpid apathy, the greatest kindness that can be shown him is a speedy sentence of expulsion. — Samuel Johnson

She did not replace my mother; no one could do that; but she came into a vacancy in my heart, which closed upon her, and I felt towards her something I have never felt for any other human being — Charles Dickens

The first thing, of course, is to find a vacancy, a place where a teacher is
wanted, and the second thing is to make the school officials believe you are just the person for
the position. — Thomas E. Sanders

A hole is a space where everything has been moved out so that opportunity has space to move in. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

The importation of foreigners into a country that has as many inhabitants as the present employments and provisions for subsistence will bear, will be in the end no increase of people, unless the new comers have more industry and frugality than the natives, and then they will provide more subsistence, and increase in the country; but they will gradually eat the natives out. Nor is it necessary to bring in foreigners to fill up any occasional vacancy in a country for such vacancy will soon be filled by natural generation. — Benjamin Franklin

A man who marries his mistress leaves a vacancy in that position. — Oscar Wilde

Forgiveness, I finally decide, is not the death of amnesia, nor is it a form of madness, as Derrida claims. For the one who forgives, it is simply a death, a dying down in the heart, the position of the already dead. It is in the end the living through, the understanding that this has happened, is happening, happens. Period. It is a feeling of nothingness that cannot be communicated to another, an absence, a bottomless vacancy held by the living, beyond all that is hatred or love. — Claudia Rankine

In the days before deathly contrivances hustled them through their lives, and when they had no telephones - another ancient vacancy profoundly responsible for leisure - they had time for everything: time to think, to talk, time to read, time to wait for a lady! — Booth Tarkington

There are many kinds of silences and not all signify absence or vacancy....Those moments are but temporary ebbs before the flow of meaning rushes in to fill the space....God may be speaking 'in ways we have yet to recognize as speech. — Terryl L. Givens

Gloomy calm of idle vacancy. — Samuel Johnson

If the mind is wearied by study, or the body worn with sickness,It is well to lie fallow for a while, in the vacancy of sheer amusement ;But when thou prosprest in health, and thine intellect can soar untired,To seek uninstructive pleasure is to slumber on the couch of indolence. — Martin Farquhar Tupper

The inspection of these chasms brought him a second pulsation of that old horror which he had used to describe to Viviette as produced in him by bottomlessness in the north heaven. The ghostly finger of limitless vacancy touched him now on the other side. — Thomas Hardy

It's not really possible to open 'The Casual Vacancy' without a lot of expectations both high and low crashing around in your brain and distorting your vision. There's no point pretending they're not there. — Lev Grossman

It was the hour of prayer. Black-beetles exploded against the walls like crackers. More than a dozen crawled over the tiles with injured wings. It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy - a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all. He knew. — Graham Greene

And still the strange meaningless conversations continue, and I wonder more and more at the fabric which nets the world together, so that anything which I do finally incubate out of my system into words will quite certainly be about solitude. Solitude and the desirability of it, if one is to achieve anything like continuity in life, is the one idea I find in the resounding vacancy which is my head. — Vita Sackville-West

True inward quietness is not that which may be produced by shutting out all outward causes of distraction
a process which, when carried out too severely, may intensify the inward ferment of the mind, especially in the young. It is rather a state of stable equilibrium; it is not vacancy, but stability
the steadfastness of a single purpose. — Caroline Emelia Stephen

One Kashmiri morning in the early spring of 1915, my grandfather Aadam Aziz hit his nose against a frost-hardened tussock of earth while attempting to pray. Three drops of blood plopped out of his left nostril, hardened instantly in the brittle air and lay before his eyes on the prayer-mat, transformed into rubies. Lurching back until he knelt with his head once more upright, he found that the tears which had sprung to his eyes had solidified, too; and at that moment, as he brushed diamonds contemptuously from his lashes, he resolved never again to kiss earth for any god or man. This decision, however, made a hole in him, a vacancy in a vital inner chamber, leaving him vulnerable to women and history. Unaware of this at first, despite his recently completed medical training, he stood up, rolled the prayer-mat into a thick cheroot, and holding it under his right arm surveyed the valley through clear, diamond-free eyes. — Salman Rushdie

Many seasoned porn whores develop an ability to check out at will. The girl, on her back has unlit vacancy signs where her eyes once were. — Tyler Knight

His fear-inflamed mind sent the control-signal to his finger-joint to fold back. The trigger sliced back. The blast seemed to lift the booth clear off the floor, drop it down again. A pin-wheel of vacancy appeared in the glass, flinging off shards and slivers. — Cornell Woolrich

The infinity of this vacancy, the pervasive pain, the longing for some spirit, some lightness, some joy - that's all that is left. — Martha Manning

There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic,too,and what he had experienced was vacancy-a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no prose at all. He knew. — Graham Greene

The university president who cashiered every professor unwilling to support Woodrow Wilson for the first vacancy in the
Trinity ... — H.L. Mencken

Art as an aesthetic principle was supported by thousands of years of discernment and psychic rewards, but art as a commodity was held up by air. The loss of confidence that affected banks and financial instruments was not affecting cherubs, cupids and flattened popes. The objects hadn't changed: what was there before was there after. But a vacancy was created with the clamoring crowds deserted and retrenched. — Steve Martin

The writer's way is rough and lonely, and who would choose it while there are vacancies in more gracious professions, such as, say, cleaning out ferryboats? — Dorothy Parker

A week goes by and I don't call Lucy or Dylan. I want to drift away from them - more than anything, I want to drift away. I sometimes imagine myself totally alone and I enjoy the feeling. And I mean something by alone, something more than the word holds. I mean something blank and pure and vacant, plus me. And also moral. This blank and pure vacancy that includes me that is also moral is so empty, it is so no one, that my presence in it makes me not exist, although I am still there, and that's what lifts all the weight. — Patrick Somerville

But where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing. From my earliest remembrance I had been as I then was in height and proportion. I had never yet seen a being resembling me or who claimed any intercourse with me. What was I? The question again recurred, to be answered only with groans. — Mary Shelley

From the beginning of my sojourn in this world there was a persistent vacancy in me where the industry ought to be. (Ought to was is better, perhaps, though the most of the authorities differ as to this. — Mark Twain

He read as others pray, as gamblers follow the spinning of the roulette wheel, as drunkards stare into vacancy; he read with such profound absorption that ever since I first watched him the reading of ordinary mortals seemed a pastime. — Stefan Zweig

Anyone who is willing to work and is serious about it will certainly find a job. Only you must not go to the man who tells you this, for he has no job to offer and doesn't know anyone who knows of a vacancy. This is exactly the reason why he gives you such generous advice, out of brotherly love, and to demonstrate how little he knows the world. — B. Traven

Not Chaos, not the darkest pit of lowest Erebus, nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out by help of dreams - can breed such fear and awe as fall upon us often when we look into our Minds, into the Mind of Man. — William Wordsworth

The world to me was a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own. — Mary Shelley

Birth and death: there was the same consciousness of heightened existence and of her own elevated importance — J.K. Rowling

A face peered. All the grey night In chaos of vacancy shone; Nought but vast Sorrow was there The sweet cheat gone. — Walter De La Mare

Myth is a tale once believed as truth; believed, it is not myth, but religion. A tale once religiously believed that has come to be called a myth is something of religion corrupted with disbelief. What are beliefs for some societies but myths for others cannot fill spiritual vacancies in the life of those others. — Laura Riding

Grover Underwood of the satyrs!" Dionysus called.
Grover came forward nervously.
"Oh, stop chewing your shirt," Dionysus chided. "Honestly, I'm not going to blast you. For your bravery and sacrifice, blah, blah, blah, and since we have an unfortunate vacancy, the gods have seen fit to name you a member of the Council of Cloven Elders."
Grover collapsed on the spot.
"Oh, wonderful," Dionysus sighed, as several naiads came forward to help Grover. "Well, when he wakes up, someone tell him that he will no longer be an outcast, and that all satyrs, naiads, and other spirits of nature will henceforth treat him as a lord of the Wild, with all rights, privileges, and honors, blah, blah, blah. Now please, drag him off before he wakes up and starts groveling."
"FOOOOOD," Grover moaned, as the nature spirits carried him away.
I figured he'd be okay. He would wake up as a lord of the Wild with a bunch of beautiful naiads taking care of him. Life could be worse. — Rick Riordan

I had never before considered the possibility that I might never even want a drink yet still be left with this horrible, throbbing vacancy in the center of my being, right where my mental health and contentment were supposed to be. — Augusten Burroughs

I very much wanted to live in Paris when I was in the army, and I was quite determined to. I could have become a dress designer: Dior was willing to take me on as an assistant, but he did not have an immediate vacancy. — Paul Johnson

Should the time come when the county family will be taken away, then the parish will feel for some time like a mouth from which a molar has been drawn - there will be a vacancy that will cause unrest and discomfort. — Sabine Baring-Gould

It is cruelty to children to keep five-year-olds sitting still, gazing into vacancy even for one hour at a time. We have little idea of the torture we thus inflict. — Ellen Swallow Richards

This ... hole in the world, man-shaped. Me-shaped. A vacancy. — Jasinda Wilder

I wanted to show how humans can have ugly feelings that they might prefer not to acknowledge; how we're all caught up in our own problems and limited by our own life experience," she says. "To judge somebody else, to declare them substandard, to conclude that their misfortunes are due to inherent character flaws, can be a way of boosting our own self-esteem, because it must follow that our comparative success or happiness is not mere luck or chance, but the reward for superior morals or talent. — J.K. Rowling

Tom got out a bit of paper and carefully unrolled it. Huckleberry viewed it wistfully. The temptation was very strong. At last he said: "Is it genuwyne?" Tom lifted his lip and showed the vacancy. "Well, all right," said Huckleberry, "it's a trade." Tom enclosed the tick in the percussion-cap box that had lately been the pinchbug's prison, and the boys separated, each feeling wealthier than before. — Mark Twain

One thing I learned about the Danes was that they knew how to spy. The monks who write the chronicles tell us that they came from nowhere, their dragon-prowed ships suddenly appearing from a blue vacancy, but it was rarely like that. The Viking crews might attack unexpectedly, but the big fleets, the war fleets, went where they knew there was already trouble. They found an existing wound and filled it like maggots. — Bernard Cornwell

He had one of those typical piece of shit days. The grind always. At least this time he had the guys to stay away from the bar and not drive home to the wife and kid drunk. He got home and immediately everything pissed him off. Sometimes the way his wife looked at him made him want to kill himself. The way she all of a sudden appeared like a total stranger. The vacancy in her eyes, it was bad. He took his son's favourite plastic mug, the one with the picture of Magic Johnson, and threw it into the trash. He felt better but not much. — Henry Rollins

History is representational, while time is abstract; both of these artifices may be found in museums, where they span everybody's own vacancy. — Robert Smithson

At the next vacancy for God, if I am elected, I shall forgive last the delicately wounded who, having been slugged no harder than anyone else, never got up again, neither to fight back, nor to finger their jaws in painful admiration. — John Ciardi

He did not go after her himself, but those months after he fell out of the tree, though his physical wounds more or less healed - though he walked with a slight limp afterward - a kind of vacancy, a silence, hung around him, like a mantle on his shoulders. — Amanda Coplin

I will say one thing has changed dramatically which is this Supreme Court vacancy, and it will reshape the race on my side, because I'd rather lose an election than lose the Supreme Court. — Hugh Hewitt

He presently grew lonesome, and started out for recreation. He ranged the whole boat - visited every part of it, with an advance guard of fleeing people in front of him and a voiceless vacancy behind him; and when his owner captured him at last, those two were the only visible beings anywhere; everybody else was in hiding, and the boat was a solitude. — Mark Twain

Whatever the reviewers feel about 'The Casual Vacancy', it is what I wanted it to be, and you can't say fairer than that as a writer. — J.K. Rowling

And the dog by the fender stretched himself out in the luxuriant vacancy of mind only known to dogs surrounded by a happy group of their friends. — Christopher Morley

What you can do is embrace what you have right now and to allow it to fill the vacancies of what you didn't get yesterday. — T.D. Jakes

I shall have less cause to regret the carrying my intended purpose into effect, foreseeing that you may immediately fill with advantage, the vacancy which will presently happen. — Henry Laurens

Nothing raises the national temperature more than a VACANCY sign hanging from the colonnaded front of the Supreme Court. — Christopher Buckley

The Human Condition has a vacancy ... a transient declaring It's Self The Victor! Till death do us part in This War for human isolation. — Rosemarie Yusen

I started writing because there's an absence of things I was familiar with or that I dreamed about. One of my senses of anger is related to this vacancy - a yearning I had as a teenager ... and when I get ready to write, I think I'm trying to fill that. — Ntozake Shange

The noisy vacancy of youth, the quiet vacancy of age. — Mason Cooley

And now come with me, for I have kept you too long from your gondola: come with me, on an autumnal morning, to a low wharf or quay at the extremity of a canal, with long steps on each side down to the water, which latter we fancy for an instant has become black with stagnation; another glance undeceives us,
it is covered with the black boats of Venice. We enter one of them, rather to try if they be real boats or not, than with any definite purpose, and glide away; at first feeling as if the water were yielding continually beneath the boat and letting her sink into soft vacancy. — John Ruskin

The (state of) vacancy should be brought to the utmost degree, and that of stillness guarded with unwearying vigour. — Lao-Tzu

I walk the straight lines. I walk through the summer nights. I walk the silver rope of dreams. I walk through dawns of dawns. There's not a lot that isn't dying. I see people parading in front of each other like insects in a killing jar, watching each other die. I walk the straight lines through the Christ machines. Through the eyes of the throwaway people. Through the wards and the shores and the cracks in the skulls of the sidewalks. Through love's howling vacancy. I am the freedom soil. I dig my own grave. I resurrect myself every night. I am all things to myself. I walk the straight lines. I walk the spider's jailhouse. I walk the think line, the thin line, the white line and all the lines in between. I wish I could trade in my eyes. — Henry Rollins

It is a naked city. Faith is not pampered, nor hope encouraged; there is no place to lay one's exhaustion: but instead pinnacles skewer it undisguised against vacancy. — William Gaddis

As the presence of those we love is as a double life, so absence, in its anxious longing and sense of vacancy, is as a foretaste of death. — Anna Brownell Jameson

You've got to work. It's about structure. It's about discipline. It's all these deadly things that your school teacher told you you needed ... You need it.
Jo speaking to Charlie Rose re: writing — J.K. Rowling

It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy
a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all. — Graham Greene

I think, again, on issues of energy, how are we going to fully utilize our energy resources in this country? What is the role of the federal government in higher education? What kind of justices would you appoint to the Supreme Court, not just because we have a vacancy now, but at least one or two potentially in the next four to eight years? — Marco Rubio

How cold the vacancy
When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist
First sees reality. The mortal no
Has its emptiness and tragic expirations. — Wallace Stevens

Mathic architects were helpless when it came to walls. Pillars they could do. Arches they were fine with. Vaults, which were just three-dimensional arches, they knew everything about. But ask them to construct a simple wall and they would go to pieces. Where anyone else in the world would construct a wall, they'd fill in the space with a system of arches and tracery. When people complained about wind, vermin, and other things that would be kept out of a normal building by walls, they might be troubled to fill up a vacancy with a stained-glass window. But we hadn't got round to putting all of those in yet. On a windy and rainy day it made buildings like this hellish. But on a day like this one it was fine because you could always see. As we scaled the flights of the southwestern tower we had views down into the Mynster, and out over the concent. — Neal Stephenson

Montana is the hostess, a pretty, pleasantly blank-looking high-school-age girl. It's not profound blankness - just the vacancy of youth. A certain position of the head, a set of the eyes, all of which can be transformed by twenty-two or twenty-five or twenty-seven, her eyes sharper, head tilted down into life, ready for impact. She just needs something terrible to happen to her, and then needs to do something terrible to someone else. After that, she's all set. — Scott Hutchins

A vacancy in the heart does not accomodate itself to a stop-gap. — Victor Hugo

It is well to lie fallow for a while. — Martin Farquhar Tupper

Appointing a sitting federal appellate judge also gives a president a unique twofer opportunity, creating a lower-court vacancy that the president can fill with a second (presumably supportive) appointee. If a sitting federal appellate judge placed on the Supreme Court is in turn replaced by a sitting federal trial judge, a president can turn a single Supreme Court vacancy into three judicial appointments. — Anonymous

The vacancy left by absence of worship is filled by mere killing of time and by boredom, which is directly related to inability to enjoy leisure; for one can only be bored if the spiritual power to be leisurely has been lost. There is an entry in Baudelaire ... One must work, if not from taste then at least from despair. For, to reduce everything to a single truth: work is less boring than pleasure. — Josef Pieper

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

I couldn't have thought of her more. Even vacancy was crowded with her. — Graham Greene

Your death and my death are mainly of importance to ourselves. The black plumes will be stripped off our hearses within the hour; tears will dry, hurt hearts close again, our graves grow level with the church-yard, and although we are away, the world wags on. It does not miss us; and those who are near us, when the first strangeness of vacancy wears off, will not miss us much either. — Alexander Smith

Beyond the queues, the vacancy screens listed jobs in a multitude of languages. Invariably, they were low-paid and short-term dead-ends. Nearby, people in headphones sat at a bank of machines: the blind and the illiterate force-fed with 'opportunities' by soothing machine voices. On the far wall, in large print, a poster declared: BEGGARS CANNOT BE CHOOSERS. — Mark Cantrell

The secret strength of things
Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome
Of Heaven is as a column, rests on thee,
And what were thou and Earth and Stars and Sea
If to the human mind's imaginings
Silence and solitude were Vacancy? — Percy Bysshe Shelley