#emptiness

They wordlessly excused each other for not loving each other as much as they had planned to. There were empty rooms in the house where they had meant to put their love, and they worked together to fill these rooms with midcentury modern furniture. ("Birthmark"). ↗

— Miranda July

#love #love

The honors of this world, what are they but puff, and emptiness, and peril of falling? ↗

— Augustine of Hippo

#falling #honors #peril #puff #world

Men's need to dominate women may be based in their own sense of marginality or emptiness; we do not know its root, and men are making no effort to discover it. ↗

— Marilyn French

#discover #dominate #effort #emptiness #know

We cannot let another person into our hearts or minds unless we empty ourselves. We can truly listen to him or truly hear her only out of emptiness. ↗

— M. Scott Peck

#cannot #emptiness #empty #hear #hearts

I told myself: 'I am surrounded by unknown things.' I imagined man without ears, suspecting the existence of sound as we suspect so many hidden mysteries, man noting acoustic phenomena whose nature and provenance he cannot determine. And I grew afraid of everything around me – afraid of the air, afraid of the night. From the moment we can know almost nothing, and from the moment that everything is limitless, what remains? Does emptiness actually not exist? What does exist in this apparent emptiness? ↗

— Guy de Maupassant

#fear #nihilism #paranoia #imagination

The artist's job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence. ↗

— Woody Allen

#artist #despair #emptiness #hope #art

[in the true mad north] of introspection, where 'falcons of the inner eye' dive and die, glimpsing in their dying fall, all life's memory of existence. ↗

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#artist #beatnik #emptiness #existentialism #art

But no: he was empty, he was confronted by a vast anger, a desperate anger, he saw it and could almost have touched it. But it was inert - if it were to live and find expression and suffer, he must lend it his own body. It was other people's anger. "Swine!" He clenched his fists, he strode along, but nothing came, the anger remained external to himself. ↗

— Jean-Paul Sartre

#emptiness #philosophy #age

I think that's what finally stopped me. I slid right to the edge. My legs were hanging over. And I could feel it too. I don't know how. There was no wind, no sound, no change of temperature. There was just this terrible emptiness reaching up for me. ↗

— Mark Z. Danielewski

#emptiness #change

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 people 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 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

#death #emptiness #grief #loss #murakami