Vacant Quotes - Page 5

• As a kid, I played my share of football in the street or in a vacant lot. When we were playing in the street, it was more touch football, so we didn't hit each other into cars.

  Barry Sanders

  Football, Kids, Car

  "Barry Sanders: 'Mr. 99'". Interview with Jon Robinson, www.espn.com. July 31, 2009.

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• I see the children with their boredom and their vacant stares.

  Billy Joel

  Children, Reality, Boredom

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• If in a city we had six vacant lots available to the youngsters of a certain neighborhood for playing ball, it might be "development" to build houses on the first, and the second, and the third, and the fourth, and even the fifth, but when we build houses on the last one, we forget what houses are for.

  Aldo Leopold

  Nature, Cities, House

  Aldo Leopold, David Earl Brown, Neil B. Carmony (1995). “Aldo Leopold's Southwest”, p.159, UNM Press

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• Nothing can be true which is either complete or vacant; every touch is false which does not suggest more than it represents, and every space is false which represents nothing.

  John Ruskin

  Art, Truth, Space

  John Ruskin, John D. Rosenberg (1964). “The Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from His Writings”, p.28, University of Virginia Press

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• I think everyone spins. You would just be an empty vacant shell reporting facts. I mean, you have your life that you bring with you to every moment that happens.

  Rosie O'Donnell

  Mean, Thinking, Shells

  Source: www.foxnews.com

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• I never hear parents exclaim impatiently, "Children, you must no make so much noise," that I do not think how soon the time may come when, beside the vacant seat, those parents would give all the world, could they hear once more the ringing laughter which once so disturbed them.

  Abbott Eliot Kittredge

  Laughter, Children, Thinking

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• And common is the commonplace, And vacant chaff well meant for grain.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Common, Grain, Wells

  'In Memoriam A. H. H.' (1850) canto 6

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• Time, which shows so vacant, indivisible, and divine in its coming, is slit and peddled into trifles and tatters. A door is to bepainted, a lock to be repaired. I want wood, or oil, or meal, or salt; the house smokes, or I have a headache; then the tax; and an affair to be transacted with a man without heart or brains; and the stinging recollection of an injurious or very awkward word,--these eat up the hours.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Time, Heart, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “Nature and Other Essays”, p.63, Courier Corporation

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• I'm very tired of staring out into your vacant faces looking back at me. Wanting to fill your empty lives with humor you couldn't possibly think of yourself... Good evening!

  Bill Hicks

  Tired, Thinking, Empty Life

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• Whatever art offered the men and women of previous eras, what it offers our own, it seems to me, is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. The town I grew up in had many vacant lots; when I go back now, the vacant lots are gone. They were a luxury, just as tigers and rhinoceri, in the crowded world that is making, are luxuries. Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.

  John Updike

  Art, Exercise, Men

  "A Few Words In Defense Of The Amateur Reader" by John Updike, www.nytimes.com. February 19, 1984.

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• At heart, he could not abide sense in women: he liked to see them as silly, as light-headed, as vain, as open to ridicule as possible; because they were then in reality what he held them to be, and wished them to be,--inferior: toys to play with, to amuse a vacant hour and to be thrown away.

  Charlotte Bronte

  Silly, Heart, Reality

  Charlotte Bronte (2010). “Shirley and The Professor”, p.119, Everyman's Library

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• Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.

  John Updike

  Exercise, Thinking, Museums

  "A Few Words In Defense Of The Amateur Reader" by John Updike, www.nytimes.com. February 19, 1984.

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• Usually when I draw, I try to be in a contemplative mood. I try to keep my mind as empty, vacant and tranquil as possible. The outer mind is like the surface of the sea. On the surface, the sea is full of waves and surges; it is all restlessness. But when we dive deep below, the same sea is all peace, calmness and quiet, and there we find the source of creativity.

  Sri Chinmoy

  Creativity, Sea, Mind

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• These words "accessible" and "emotionally available" get thrown at us from agents and editors and publishers - or the reverse - if it's not all goo-ey and sentimental we're told it's "cold" or "uncaring" or "emotionally vacant." In other words, responses to women's writing in particular continue to be "gendered."

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Writing, Editors, Agents

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The winter evening settles down With smell of steaks in passageways. Six o'clock. The burnt-out ends of smoky days. And now a gusty shower wraps The grimy scraps Of withered leaves about your feet And newspapers from vacant lots; The showers beat On broken blinds and chimney-pots, And at the corner of the street A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps. And then the lighting of the lamps.

  T. S. Eliot

  Lonely, Horse, Winter

  Prufrock (1917) "Preludes"

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• There is nothing more distressing ... than the hard, scoffing spirit which treats the allegation of dishonesty in a public man as a cause for laughter. Such laughter is worse than the crackling of thorns under a pot, for it denotes not merely the vacant mind, but the heart in which high emotions have been choked before they could grow to fruition.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Laughter, Heart, Men

  The Man with the Muck-rake, delivered 14 April 1906

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• The past, the future, majesty, love - if they are vacant of you, you are vacant of them.

  Walt Whitman

  Past, Majesty, Ifs

  Walt Whitman “Annotated LEAVES OF GRASS with English Grammar Exercises: by Walt Whitman (Author), Robert Powell (Editor)”, Powell Publications, LLC

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• Watch the growth of middle level management. Don't automatically fill vacant jobs. Leave some positions unfilled for 6-8 months to see what happens. You will find you won't need to fill some of them.

  Donald Rumsfeld

  Jobs, Growth, Watches

  Donald Rumsfeld (2001). “Public Statements of Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, 2001”

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• There are very few films that I've ever seen in my life that would be as silent or vacant as something like Jeremiah Johnson, and that to me was unbelievably captivating. You can see the same about [The Outlaw] Josey Wales: there's very little dialogue, and yet it contains such a deep, rich story. I've always thought of the western as American storytelling at its best.

  Kiefer Sutherland

  Littles, Would Be, Stories

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• What a sight there is in that "smile!" it changes like a chameleon. There is a vacant smile, a cold smile, a smile of hate, a satiric smile, an affected smile; but, above all, a smile of love.

  Thomas Chandler Haliburton

  Hate, Sight, Cold

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• When children ask you questions about gray hairs, and wrinkles in the face, and sighs that have no words, and smiles too bright to be carved upon the radiant face by the hands of hypocrisy--when they ask you about kneeling at the altar, speaking into the vacant air, and uttering words to an unseen and in an invisible Presence--when they interrogate you about your great psalms, and hymns, and anthem-bursts of thankfulness, what is your reply to these? Do not be ashamed of the history. Keep steadily along the line of fact. Say what happened to you, and magnify God in the hearing of the inquirer.

  Joseph Parker

  Children, Hymns, Wrinkles

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• In a city you thought of all life as human life. You had to live in the heart of the woods to realize that humanity was a slight ripple on the surface of a flood of life that seeped into every vacant crack, flowed into every biological vacuum the moment it occurred.

  Helen McCloy

  Heart, Cities, Humanity

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• As an actor, if you're just sitting and staring and you don't know who you are in your own mind, it's vacant. And sometimes the camera is an X-ray machine, it can pick it up.

  Albert Brooks

  Mind, Rays, Cameras

  "Albert Brooks Says He Knows His ‘Drive’ Character’s Entire Backstory" by Christopher Bell, www.indiewire.com. September 16, 2011.

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• Modern science kills God and takes his place on the vacant throne. Science is the sole legitimate arbiter of all relavent truth.

  Vaclav Havel

  Thrones, Modern, Sole

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• In that sweet mood when pleasure loves to pay
  Tribute to ease; and, of its joy secure,
  The heart luxuriates with indifferent things,
  Wasting its kindliness on stocks and stones,
  And on the vacant air.

  William Wordsworth

  Sweet, Nature, Heart

  William Wordsworth (1847). “The Poems of William Wordsworth”, p.143

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