#emptiness

I have been cheated out of being treated like a human being. In my reflection I saw an empty vessel. They had cheated me and I was desperate to make the sharp pain in my head stop. ↗

— M.B. Wilmot

#human-nature #humanity #racism #rage #nature

I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo. ↗

— Sylvia Plath

#emptiness #normalcy #numbness #stillness #chaos

This accidental meeting of possibilities calls itself I. I ask: what am I doing here? And, at once, this I becomes unreal. ↗

— Dag Hammarskjöld

#self #zen #zen

If emptiness is empty, how can something be borne or awaken from it? ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#dejan-stojanovic #emptiness #empty #literature #literature-quotes

Illusion is needed to disguise the emptiness within. ↗

— Arthur Erickson

#emptiness #illusion #needed #within

You know that day after day of, Oh God what am I going to do with myself feeling? The fear of the emptiness that it implies keeps me going. ↗

— Anish Kapoor

#am #day #emptiness #fear #feeling

Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#becomes #callous #conform #dull #emptiness

It's a great excuse and luxury, having a job and blaming it for your inability to do your own art. When you don't have to work, you are left with the horror of facing your own lack of imagination and your own emptiness. A devastating possibility when finally time is your own. ↗

— Julian Schnabel

#blaming #devastating #emptiness #excuse #facing

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

At last the cold crept up my spine; at last it filled me from foot to head; at last I grew so chill and desolate that all thought and pain and awareness came to a standstill. I wasn't miserable anymore: I wasn't anything at all. I was a nothing-- a random configuration of molecules. If my heart still beat I didn't know it. I was aware of one thing only; next to the gaping fact called Death, all I knew was nothing, all I did meant nothing, all I felt conveyed nothing. This was no passing thought. It was a gnawing, palpable emptiness more real than the cold. ↗

— David James Duncan

#realization #death