Emptiness Quotes - Page 14

• Until the bitter end, the emptiness inside her was hers alone.

  Haruki Murakami

  Numbness, Bitter, Detachment

  Haruki Murakami (2011). “Kafka On The Shore”, p.426, Random House

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• This morning I suddenly catch myself: I'm not there, I'm so lost in thought, I don't know what's going on around me. Can you think yourself to death?

  Anna Kamienska

  Morning, Thinking, Numbness

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• She examined me, she looked at me critically and said, "Why are you trying to starve yourself?" To keep myself from feeling love, from feeling lust, from feeling anything at all.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Numbness, Lust, Feelings

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• Your superhuman power was to be able not to feel. Is it there inside everybody, this self that comes out while you are in captivity? You become the closest approximation of yourself that can tolerate living there.

  Heather O'Neill

  Numbness, Self, Able

  Heather O'Neill (2014). “Lullabies for Little Criminals”, p.139, Hachette UK

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• It's important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If there's a window, you must imagine your body falling out the window. If there's a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If there's a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under its wheels. These exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance.

  Susanna Kaysen

  Distance, Fall, Numbness

  "Girl, Interrupted". Book by Susanna Kaysen, 1994.

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• Nobody believes the identities we've made for ourselves. I feel like everybody in the world is fake now - as though people had true cores once, but hucked them away and replaced them with something more attractive but also hollow.

  Douglas Coupland

  Believe, Numbness, People

  "Girlfriend in a Coma". Book by Douglas Coupland, 1998.

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• I felt a kind of numbness, an enervation, but more particularly an odd fragility - as if my body had actually become frail, hypersensitive and somehow disjointed and clumsy, lacking normal coordination. And soon I was in the throes of a pervasive hypochondria.

  William Styron

  Numbness, Body, Normal

  William Styron (1990). “Darkness visible: a memoir of madness”, Random House Incorporated

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• I'm up all night against my will My medicine won't let me feel anything at all The doctor gave me sleeping pills and I took one Then I feel all alone, sleeping like a stone.

  Joseph Arthur

  Sleep, Night, Numbness

  Song: Your Are The Dark, Album: Redemption's Son, 2002

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• The primordial purity of the ground completely transcends words, concepts, and formulations.

  Jamgon Kongtrul

  Purity, Concepts

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• I would hold on, and hold on, until my hands clutch at emptiness.

  Juliet Marillier

  Hands, Clutch

  Juliet Marillier (2010). “Son of the Shadows: Book Two of the Sevenwaters Trilogy”, p.47, Macmillan

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• Behold the child, by Nature's kindly law, Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw; Some livelier plaything gives his youth delight, A little louder, but as empty quite; Scarfs, garters, gold, amuse his riper stage, And beads and prayer-books are the toys of age. Pleased with this bauble still, as that before, Till tired he sleeps, and life's poor play is o'er.

  Alexander Pope

  Life, Prayer, Children

  Alexander Pope, John Wilson Croker (1871). “The Works: Including Several Hundred Unpublished Letters, and Other New Materials”, p.397

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• It is time that we allow the Word of God, not the glamorized lies of Hollywood to become the cornerstone of our convictions, thoughts, and attitude. It is time we trade the emptiness of pop culture entertainment for the real-life adventure of a Christ-built existence. Only then will truth reign and rule in our lives. Only then will our lives make an eternal impact for His glory.

  Leslie Ludy

  Attitude, Lying, Real

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• 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.

  E. F. Schumacher

  Lying, Ideas, Giving

  "SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL".

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• If things do not exist as fixed, independent entities, then how can they die? Our notion of death as the sudden expiration of that which was once so real starts to unwind. If things do not exist in their own right and are flickering rather than static, then we can no longer fear their ultimate demise. We may fear their instability, or their emptiness, but the looming threat of death starts to seem absurd. Things are constantly dying, we find. Or rather, they are constantly in flux, arising and passing away with each moment of consciousness.

  Mark Epstein

  Real, Independent, Dying

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• In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

  Jimmy Carter

  Strong, Hard Work, Self

  Energy and the National Goals - A Crisis of Confidence, delivered 15 July, 1979

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• A morality that holds need as a claim, holds emptiness-non-existence-as its standard of value; it rewards an absence, a defect: weakness, inability, incompetence, suffering, disease, disaster, the lack, the fault, the flaw-the zero.

  Ayn Rand

  Zero, Suffering, Weakness

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.32, Penguin

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• The best way I have ever found to fill that hole is not to seek external motivations to fill the emptiness, but to ignite the internal fire that will never go out. To light up my own inner sky.

  James Altucher

  Motivation, Fire, Light

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• Freedom comes from seeing the ignorance of your critics and discovering the emptiness of their virtue.

  Ayn Rand

  Ignorance, Virtue, Critics

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• The future exists only in our imagination
  it is a collective story waiting for our voices to express
  that can only happen when you and I are willing to enter the emptiness
  listening in the silence
  until we can begin to create a future we can befriend.

  Dawna Markova

  Voice, Imagination, Waiting

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• Big? Sure. But, he can't catch mice! So for your big tree. No use? Then plant it in the wasteland - in emptiness. Walk idly around it and rest under it's shadow. No axe or saw prepares its end. No one will ever cut it down. Useless? You should worry!.

  Zhuangzi

  Cutting, Worry, Tree

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• Buddhist words such as compassion and emptiness don't mean much until we start cultivating our innate ability simply to be there with pain with an open heart and the willingness not to instantly try to get ground under our feet. For instance, if what we're feeling is rage, we usually assume that there are only two ways to relate to it. One is to blame others. Lay it all on somebody else; drive all blames into everyone else. The other alternative is to feel guilty about our rage and blame ourselves.

  Pema Chodron

  Buddhist, Pain, Heart

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• Letting go, it's so hard The way it's hurting now To get this love untied So tough to stay with this thing 'cos if I follow through I face what I denied I'll get those hooks out of me And I'll take out the hooks that I sunk deep in your side Kill that fear of emptiness, that loneliness I hide.

  Peter Gabriel

  Broken Heart, Letting Go, Hurt

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• It’s hard to grieve in a town where everything that happens is God’s will. It’s hard to know what to do with your emptiness when you’re not supposed to have emptiness.

  Miriam Toews

  Grieving, Towns, Happens

  Miriam Toews (2004). “A Complicated Kindness: A Novel”, A.A. Knopf Canada

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• People frequently comment on the emptiness in one night stands, but emptiness here has always been just another word for darkness. Blind encounters writing sonnets no one can ever read. Desire and pain communicated in the vague language of sex.
  None of which made sense to me until much later when I realized everything I thought I'd retained of my encounters added up to so very little, hardly enduring, just shadows of love outlining nothing at all.

  Mark Z. Danielewski

  Sex, Pain, Writing

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• So, to meditate is to purge the mind of its self-centered activity. And if you have come this far in meditation, you will find there is silence, a total emptiness. The mind is uncontaminated by society; it is no longer subject to any influence, to the pressure of any desire. It is completely alone, and being alone, untouched it is innocent. Therefore there is a possibility for that which is timeless, eternal, to come into being. This whole process is meditation.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Self, Silence, Meditation

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