Hollow Quotes - Page 2

• So many bright futures consigned to the ashes of the past.So many dreams lost in the madness that had engulfed us.Except for a few widely scattered shouts of joy,the survivors of the abyss sat hollow-eyed and silent, trying to comprehend a world without war.

  Paul Fussell

  Dream, War, Past

  Paul Fussell (1990). “Thank God for the Atom Bomb, and Other Essays”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include the truth of contact or be forever hollow.

  Dan Simmons

  Forever, Religion, Endymion

  Dan Simmons (2011). “Rise of Endymion”, p.403, Spectra

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  Mark Twain

  Boys, Men, Order

  Mark Twain (1992). “Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn”, p.14, Wordsworth Editions

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Home is where the heart is, I thought now, gathering myself together in Betty's Luncheonette. I had no heart any more, it had been broken; or not broken, it simply wasn't there any more. It had been scooped neatly out of me like the yolk from a hard-boiled egg, leaving the rest of me bloodless and congealed and hollow. I'm heartless, I thought. Therefore I'm homeless.

  Margaret Atwood

  Home, Heart, Eggs

  Margaret Atwood (2007). “The Blind Assassin: A Novel”, p.447, Anchor

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• I felt no passion, no jealousy, no nostalgia. I was hollow, clear-headed, clean, and as emotionless as an aluminum pot.

  Umberto Eco

  Passion, Aluminum, Nostalgia

  Umberto Eco (2007). “Foucault's Pendulum”, p.219, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• I become like a tuning fork to the information that is coming through me, in shamanism they call it being the 'hollow reed'.

  Tom Kenyon

  Tuning, Information, Reeds

  8 Copy quote

• When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Book, Writing, Sound

  "Aphorisms". Book by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Notebook D 66, 1799.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.

  John Ashbery

  Poetry, Hammers

  8 Copy quote

• Fame puts you there where things are hollow.

  David Bowie

  Fame

  Song: Fame D Bowie J Lennon C Alomar, Album: Young Americans, 1975

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Genius, as an explosive power, beats gunpowder hollow.

  Thomas Huxley

  Power, Gunpowder, Genius

  Leonard Huxley, Thomas Henry Huxley (2011). “Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley”, p.53, Cambridge University Press

  24 Copy quote

  Show source

• I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilization than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risk the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is! The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.

  Charles Darwin

  Struggle, Fighting, Ideas

  Charles Darwin (2016). “Life and Letters of Charles Darwin: the Evolution”, p.209, VM eBooks

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• When we heard about the hippies, the barely more than boys and girls who decided to try something different ... we laughed at them. We condemned them, our children, for seeking a different future. We hated them for their flowers, for their love, and for their unmistakable rejection of every hideous, mistaken compromise that we had made throughout our hollow, money-bitten, frightened, adult lives

  June Jordan

  Girl, Children, Hippie

  18 Copy quote

• The disenfranchised offspring, along with an entire ageless class of human discards, know only that they are doomed. They are drawn to spikes and pentagrams, gasoline, guitars screaming like whips, MIDI-programmed Thanatos, with sufficient amplitude to occupy that hollow space where consciousness once resided. These Dionysians obliterate themselves by removing filters, ultimately becoming insensate with sensation. This mode of behaviour originates in the superstitious belief that transcendence is acquired in the precise ratio by which reason is destroyed.

  Adam Parfrey

  Guitar, Class, Space

  9 Copy quote

• ...out of the blue, he kissed me. Right in the middle of the Robert E. Lee Hotel Restaurant, he kissed me so slowly with an open mouth and every single thing in my body-my skin, my collarbone, the hollow backs of my knees, everything inside of me filled up with light.

  Kathryn Stockett

  Light, Blue, Filled Up

  Kathryn Stockett (2009). “The Help”, p.183, Penguin

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• She realized that being starved for words was the same as being starved for food, because both left a hollow place inside you, a place you needed filled to make it through another day. Rachel remembered how growing up she’d thought living on a farm with just a father was as lonely as you could be. (130)

  Ron Rash

  Lonely, Growing Up, Father

  4 Copy quote

• We live on the circumference of a hollow circle. We draw the circumference, like spiders, out of ourselves: it is all criticism of criticism.

  Laura Riding

  Circles, Criticism, Spiders

  "Anarchism Is Not Enough". Book by Laura Riding. Chapter "The Corpus", 1928.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The earth is the Lord's fullness thereof: this is no longer a hollow dictum of religion, but a directive for economic action toward human brotherhood.

  Lewis Mumford

  Humanity, Brotherhood, Earth

  Lewis Mumford (1954). “In the Name of Sanity”, New York : Harcourt, Brace

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Now hollow fires burn out to black, And lights are guttering low: Square your shoulders, lift your pack And leave your friends and go.

  A. E. Housman

  Friendship, Fire, Squares

  Quoted in Bernard Levin Hannibal's Footsteps (1985).

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I somehow make it through the first month. I dress and brush my teeth when they tell me to. And I experience the hollow feeling of complete loss, which is emptiness.

  Holly Goldberg Sloan

  Loss, Feelings, Teeth

  Holly Goldberg Sloan (2013). “Counting by 7s”, p.116, Penguin

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• The bigness of the world is redemption. Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground. To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Self, Space, Despair

  Rebecca Solnit (2013). “The Faraway Nearby”, p.22, Granta Books

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• You know nothing of war. War is dark. Black as pitch. It is not a God. It does not laugh or weep. It rewards neither skill nor daring. It is not a trial of souls, not the measure of wills. Even less is it a tool, a means to some womanish end. It is merely the place where the iron bones of the earth meet the hollow bones of men and break them.

  R. Scott Bakker

  War, Mean, Dark

  R. Scott Bakker (2008). “The Darkness that Comes Before: The Prince of Nothing, Book One (The Prince of Nothing)”, p.369, The Overlook Press

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• The Raven's house is built with reeds, — Sing woe, and alas is me! And the Raven's couch is spread with weeds, High on the hollow tree; And the Raven himself, telling his beads In penance for his past misdeeds, Upon the top I see.

  Thomas D

  Weed, Past, Ravens

  6 Copy quote

• In the end the great truth will have been learned that the quest is greater than what is sought, the effort finer that the prize (or rather, that the effort is the prize), the victory cheap and hollow were it not for the rigor of the game.

  Benjamin Cardozo

  Truth, Struggle, Games

  58 Copy quote

• Life and stories are alike in one way: They are full of hollows. The king and queen have no children: They have a child hollow. The girl has a wicked stepmother: She has a mother hollow. In a story, a baby comes along to fill the child hollow. But in life, the hollows continue empty.

  Franny Billingsley

  Girl, Mother, Baby

  Franny Billingsley (2013). “Chime”, p.160, A&C Black

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• But his face had that hollow look, as if there was something gone... you know that look. The inward focus. Distantly attentive to the home you're missing, or the someone you're missing. That look that a bird has when it turns it dry reptilian eye on you. That look that doesn't see you because the mind is filled up with someone it would rather see.

  Gregory Maguire

  Home, Eye, Filled Up

  4 Copy quote