Emptiness Quotes - Page 22

• Our actions and experiences will direct us. In other words, we will be guided by the inherent emptiness of the things we choose to interact with.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhism, Mindfulness, Our Actions

  Frederick Lenz (1994). “Surfing the Himalayas: conversations and travels with Master Fwap”, Interglobal Seminars

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• We do not truly speak except at a distance. There is no word not severed.

  Edmond Jabes

  Distance, Numbness, Speak

  Edmond Jabès (1993). “The Book of Margins”, p.174, University of Chicago Press

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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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• He'd been numb a long time, years. All his nights down Ninsei, his nights with Linda, numb in bed and numb at the cold sweating center of every drug deal. But now he'd found this warm thing, this chip of murder. Meat, some part of him said. It's the meat talking, ignore it.

  William Gibson

  Night, Numbness, Talking

  William Gibson (2000). “Neuromancer”, p.130, Penguin

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• I am feeling fine. I remember these words and recite them. These are the things you say when asked how you are. After all, it would be odd to say: I'm not feeling. Or, more to the point: I'm not, I have ceased to be. Where am I?

  Marya Hornbacher

  Numbness, Feelings, Would Be

  Marya Hornbacher (2009). “Madness: A Bipolar Life”, p.198, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Winning intoxicates you, and numbs you to the sufferings of others.

  Margaret Atwood

  Winning, Numbness, Suffering Of Others

  Margaret Atwood (2011). “The Robber Bride”, p.256, Anchor

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• She began to feel like the plastic doll she had been named after, without even a hole where her mouth was supposed to be.

  Francesca Lia Block

  Numbness, Mouths, Dolls

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• The music left only this bad hurt in her, and a blankness. She could not remember any of the symphony, not even the last few notes. She tried to remember, but no sound at all came to her. Now that it was over there was only her heart like a rabbit and this terrible hurt.

  Carson McCullers

  Hurt, Heart, Numbness

  Carson McCullers (2010). “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter”, p.119, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Human beings don't show, any more than cities at dusk, their real necessities! And yet if you looked -- past the circle of outside lights, through the street walls still standing -- into the want and emptiness within!

  Phyllis Bottome

  Wall, Real, Past

  Phyllis Bottome (1998). “Old Wine: A Novel”, p.221, Northwestern University Press

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• Just as the grammarian makes one study grammar,
  A Buddha teaches according to the tolerance of his students;
  Some he urges to refrain from sins, others to do good,
  Some to rely on dualism, other on non-dualism;
  And to some he teaches the profound,
  The terrifying, the practice of enlightenment,
  Whose essence is emptiness that is compassion

  Akkineni Nagarjuna

  Compassion, Essence, Practice

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• Home is a place in the mind. When it is empty, it frets. It is fretful with memory, faces and places and times gone by. Beloved images rise up in disobedience and make a mirror for emptiness. Then what resentful wonder, and what half-aimless seeking. It is a silly state of affairs. It is a silly creature that tries to get a smile from even the most familiar and loving shadow. Comical and hopeless, the long gaze back is always turned inward.

  Maeve Brennan

  Memories, Silly, Home

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• 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

  Fall, Suicidal, Thinking

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• What opposite discoveries we have seen! (Signs of true genius, and of empty pockets.) One makes new noses, one a guillotine, One breaks your bones, one sets them in their sockets; But vaccination certainly has been A kind antithesis to Congreve's rockets.

  Lord Byron

  Science, Discovery, Opposites

  Lord Byron (2015). “Don Juan”, p.28, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• Pain may be said to follow pleasure as its shadow; but the misfortune is that in this particular case, the substance belongs to the shadow, the emptiness to its cause.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Pain, Shadow, Substance

  Charles Caleb Colton (1824). “Lacon, Or, Many Things in a Few Words: Addressed to Those who Think”, p.83

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• Because of watching your breath and thoughts you have come to know now that you are neither thoughts nor your breath, you are the watcher, the witness. This is awareness. This is what I call meditation. Once you have known this awareness you are unidentified with your body, with your mind. Now you experience a vastness inside you, in one sense utterly empty and in another sense overflowingly full. Because of its emptiness you will remain calm and quiet. And because of its overflowing fullness you will be creative.

  Rajneesh

  Creative, Meditation, Mind

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• This 3HO shall be the most important legacy on this planet for the Age of Aquarius. Sooner or later people will experience a tremendous amount of emptiness which always brings a void. A void brings unhappiness. Then people will want to find a place where they can be healthy, happy, and holy.

  Harbhajan Singh Yogi

  Aquarius, People, Healthy

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• The more desires you have, the more misery you will create for yourself. Misery is a consequence of desiring - and you go on desiring. In fact, you think that if your desires are fulfilled your miseries will disappear. In the first place they are never fulfilled; in the second place, if they are fulfilled, nothing is fulfilled by their fulfillment. You remain as empty as you have always been - or even more, because up to now you were occupied with a certain desire; now even that is fulfilled. A deep deep emptiness comes to you.

  Rajneesh

  Thinking, Desire, Facts

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• I would like you to drop the ego, to dissolve, to disappear, because only then is there fulfillment. The ego knows only emptiness; it is always unfulfilled. By the very nature, by its very intrinsic nature, it cannot attain to fulfillment. When you are not, fulfillment is. Call it God, or give it a name Patanjali would like - samadhi - the attainment of the ultimate, but it comes when you disappear.

  Rajneesh

  Names, Giving, Ego

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• In the Lotus Sutra, it is said everything is emptiness - this world is empty, hell is empty, heaven is empty, God is empty, everything is emptiness. Emptiness is the nature of all things, nothingness, so be attuned to nothingness and you will achieve.

  Rajneesh

  Heaven, Lotuses, World

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• A deep inner emptiness is needed; that inner emptiness becomes the womb. So I`m not saying stop doing, stop action; I`m not saying that. I am saying that whatsoever you are doing, let it be just an outside activity. Inside become feminine, silent, doors opened, empty, waiting.

  Rajneesh

  Doors, Waiting, Action

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