"Emptiness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... reposed, rim upwards, opposite the double door of the drawing-room, haunted, it was said, by evoked ghosts, and frequented, it was to be supposed, by fugitive revolutionists. The cracked white paint of the panels, the tarnished gilt of the mouldings, permitted one to imagine nothing but dust and emptiness within. Before turning the massive brass handle, Peter Ivanovitch gave his young companion a sharp, ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... lingering days and sharp nights of autumn, and the brooding pause before the rigours of winter, and make the whole masque of the seasons a pageant and metaphor of the lapse of life itself. Or a later art finds in the harsh moralisation of ancient legends the substance of sermons on the emptiness of pleasure and the fragility of loveliness; and the bitter laugh over the empty casket of Pandora[8] comes from a heart wrung with the sorrow that beauty is less strong than time. Nor is the burden of these poems only ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... trees of Eden's swamp lot; the heat waves of a blistering hot day still dancing their devil's dance down the road like wriggling circumflexes to accent a false promise of coolness off there in the distance; the ominous emptiness of the landscape; the brooding quiet, cut through only by the frogs and the dry flies tuning up for their evening concert; the bandannaed negress wrangling at the weeds with her hoe blade inside the rail ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... that evening, late and tired and impatient after an unsatisfactory day. He brushed past Felix, still sitting on the step, flung down his bundle of papers, and went over to the fire. The little carved money box stood open on the mantel, revealing its emptiness. ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... an initial moment of negation, in which the movement of the interest is resisted. It must be checked, and its headway overcome, if it is to be redirected. The exaggeration of this moment of negation, or a steady persistence in it, is asceticism. Its fault lies in its emptiness, in its destruction or perversion of that which it was designed ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... still our saviour, for that help of old: Shall they that tell of thee hereafter tell "By him was Thebes raised up, and after fell!" Nay, lift us till we slip no more. Oh, let That bird of old that made us fortunate Wing back; be thou our Oedipus again. And let thy kingdom be a land of men, Not emptiness. Walls, towers, and ships, they all Are nothing with no men ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles
... Edward, the Black Prince, the hero of Crecy, Henry IV., the usurper, Cardinal Chatillon; but of the shrine itself, of the body it held up to love and honour and worship there was nothing, no word even, no sign at all to tell that ever such a thing had been, only an emptiness and a space and a silence ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... the desire to achieve, yet from the depths of his soul came only emptiness. Vague, purposeless aspirations, like disembodied spirits, haunted him by night and by day. Before his inner vision came unfamiliar scenes, detached fragments of conversation, the atmosphere, the feeling of an old ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... forced up by special machinations, such as Clodius imputed sometimes to Pompeius, sometimes to Cicero, and these in their turn charged on Clodius, cannot be determined; the continuance of piracy, the emptiness of the public chest, and the negligent and disorderly supervision of the supplies of corn by the government were already quite sufficient of themselves, even without political forestalling, to produce scarcities of bread in a great city dependent almost solely ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... land like England, where there is great wealth, little education and little general thought, people like Miss Mayor's heroine are common; we have all met not one or two but dozens of her; we know her emptiness, her tenacity, her futility, savagery and want of light; all circles contain some examples of her, all people some of her shortcomings; and judgment of her, even the isolation of her in portraiture, is dangerous, since the world does not consist of her and life needs her. In life as ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... pelting rain we took possession of the largest hut. It is decidedly annoying to get thoroughly wet at the end of a long day, and the prospect of a night in damp clothes was in no way pleasing. The hut was damp and cold, and it had the chilly feeling which only comes from a long period of emptiness, and strikes to the marrow. But our men turned to with a will, cleaning out the hut, strewing it with very wet rushes, and piling up a big log-fire in the middle. We were pretty hungry, too, a couple of eggs at six a.m. and a few strawberries at midday are not much ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... 'death in us, life in you.'—In us, emptiness, weakness, suffering, pressure, perplexity. In you life—life—life! As if Paul would say, 'the more I am pressed above measure, the more the life of Jesus is abundant in its outflow, and in its quickening of other lives.' This is the apostolic life. Through the Eternal Spirit, Christ ...
— Parables of the Christ-life • I. Lilias Trotter
... Krakatoa Villa early next day she found an empty house, and a note signed Jeremiah that explained its emptiness. We had been sent for to the Major, and Sally wasn't to be frightened. He had had a better night than last night, the doctor and nurse said; and Sally might come on as soon as she had had a good lunch. Only she was on ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... quickly, somewhat surprised by his size. He bounced well into the studio with an air of splendid intrepidity, which would have been more splendid had he been three or four inches higher and thicker, and uttered a snort of disappointment at its emptiness. ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... of the tall blackened planking had been torn down. The pieces of it lay about, and the earth had been dug up to considerable depth, to make a foundation for a new wall between Life and Death. The uncanny emptiness of the place seized upon me. I halted involuntarily as if to harden myself against it. It was a raw, cold, stormy evening. The clouds flew past the moon in jagged fragments, so that the churchyard, with its white crosses ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... on, the emptiness in the house became to him like that of the grave, and he learned presently that the peevish and exacting old lady who had not stirred for years from her sick-bed had left a vacancy larger than all ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... milk shot into the pail with an angry rapidity. The bar of sunlight lay almost horizontally now across the upper emptiness of the barn, transforming the thick-hung cobwebs into golden draperies and accentuating the twilight gloom below. Janet threw the kitten out of her lap and, jumping from the chair, walked nervously to the window and looked out absently upon ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... driver was in search of her. Her first impulse was to crouch down under the ledge till he had passed; but the instinct of concealment was overruled by the relief of feeling that someone was near her in the awful emptiness. She stood up and ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... and a company under the earth; and the angels came back; one company said: "We searched the swampy marges and saw neither a god nor a heaven nor any prayer," and the other company said: "We probed the lofty emptiness and we did not touch a god or a ...
— My Neighbors - Stories of the Welsh People • Caradoc Evans
... hid his agitation by complete composure. No man is strong enough to bear such sudden alternations from the height of happiness to the depths of wretchedness. So he had caught a glimpse of happy life the better to feel the emptiness of his previous existence? There was a terrible storm within him; but he had learned to endure, and bore the shock of tumultuous thoughts as a granite cliff stands out against the surge ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... it, than I perceive myself naked, and stript of all things - yea even of my very self. I see myself, and the whole frame of nature, shrink into fleeting ideas, which, like Epicurus's atoms, dance about in emptiness. ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... has dropped from out the heaven; so this precious pearl no longer gleams among the jewels of society, and there she breathes in a foreign land, among strange faces and stranger customs, and, when she thinks of what is past, laughs at some present emptiness, and tries to persuade her withering heart that the mind is independent of country, and blood, and opinion. And her father's face no longer shines with its proud love, and her mother's voice no longer whispers to her with sweet anxiety. Clouded is the brow of her bold brother, and ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... An age of unlimited declamation, an age of incessant talk, is a hotbed in which real depth and nobility of feeling runs miserably to seed. Style is never worse than it is in ages which employ themselves in teaching little else. Such teaching produces an emptiness of thought concealed under a plethora of words. This age of countless oratorical masters was emphatically the period of decadence and decay. There is a hollow ring about it, a falsetto tone in its voice; a fatiguing literary grimace in the manner of ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... nevertheless, a considerable scene. The idealist driven into squalid actualities deserves a martyr's crown. In one single misfortune he suffers all the calamities of the human race, and in one personal horror he sees the death, emptiness, and corruption of all human endeavours. In this exaggeration, these mystics show their genius; they suffer too much in order that ordinary people may suffer a little less. Poor Orange! He is certainly fine, for, even if I discard the mannerisms, the eccentricity, the possibly natural ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... placid and full of peace, quiet with the lull of emptiness. But in them Truda did not forget. She was realizing herself, and her capacity to deal with a situation that would not be devised to show her talents. She felt that she stood, for the first time, on the threshold of brisk, perilous, actual life, of that life which ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... behind. She had crossed the orbits of three others. The last of these was a gas giant with innumerable moonlets revolving about it. It was now some thirty millions of miles back and twenty to one side. The sun, ahead, flared and flamed in emptiness against that expanse ...
— The Aliens • Murray Leinster
... our own day, Alice Morse Earle, has well expressed our opinion when she says in her Child Life in Colonial Days: "The terrible verses telling of God's judgment on the land, of fear of the pit, of the snare, of emptiness and waste, of destruction and desolation, must have sunk deep into the heart of the sick child, and produced the condition shown by this entry when she was a few years older: 'When I came in, past 7 at night, my wife met me in the Entry and told me Betty had ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... fog-buoy's squattering flight Guides us through the haggard night; When the warning bugle blows; When the lettered doorways close; When our brittle townships press, Impotent, on emptiness. ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... had spent itself earlier in the week; for Claudia had this luxurious apartment to herself. Something about its air of rich privacy, its diffusion of that sympathetic quality in other countries so conspicuously absent from the public show-room, seemed to emphasize its present emptiness. It was as though the flowers, the carpet, the lounges, surrounded their visitor's solitary advance with the mute assurance that they had done all they could toward making the thing "go off," and that if they had failed it was simply for lack of co-operation. She ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... umbrellas. Nor did the presence of the worshippers themselves impart any life to the dreary apartment. Scattered throughout the white pews, in dull, shapeless, neutral blotches, rigidly separated from each other, they seemed only to accent the colorless church and the emptiness of all things. A few children, who had huddled together for warmth in one of the back benches and who had became glutinous and adherent through moisture, were laboriously drawn out and painfully picked apart by a ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... the sufferer falls a victim to a kind of nostalgia; he regrets the many sights to be seen for nothing in Paris. The isolation, the darkened days, the suffering that affects the mind and spirits even more than the body, the emptiness of the life,—all these things tend to induce him to cling to the human being who waits on him as a drowned man clings to a plank; and this especially if the bachelor patient's character is as weak as his nature ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... wrote at this time. "I have been resting all through the latter part of May (1841) in a bathtub, taking three-hour baths every day to keep down the inflammation which threatened me, and following a debilitating diet, which has resulted in what, in my case, amounts to a disease, namely, emptiness of the brain. Not a stroke of work, not an atom of strength, and up to the beginning of this month I have remained in the agreeable condition of an oyster. But at last Dr. Nacquart is satisfied and I am back ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... moment both girls had vanished as if by magic, the sparrows were away on the roof, and the pigeons in flight. The servants in the yard stopped their work. Raisky looked in amazement on the emptiness and at the corn scattered at ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... "seemed" in his inmost musings, for it was never quite certain what really did please and displease her. It was always puzzling to him to reconcile her undoubted intellectual activity with the practical emptiness of the existence she professed to enjoy. In one direction, she had indeed a genuine outlet for her energies, which he could understand her regarding in the light of an occupation. She was crazier about flowers and plants than anybody he had ever heard ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... not without inward misgiving that Cyril and Frank found themselves deposited in the hall of their glum old aunt's large and lonely house, the very size and emptiness of which had tended not a little to increase the poor lady's vapours. However, they were naturally graceful and well-bred, so that, in spite of the patronising empire assumed over them by the vulgar and half-educated Miss Sprong— which Cyril especially was ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... at the rail, gazing far out into the vague emptiness through which the air-liner ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... Morris Cove while they creaked and fretted. And here was the very shop, arising in front of me as from times before the flood. With it there arose, too, a recollection of my greenness and timidity. And mingled with all the hours of happiness of those times there were hours, also, of emptiness and loneliness—hours when, newcome to my surroundings, for fear of rebuff I ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... events and to view these as part of its recent experiences. In this case the mnemonic image becomes transformed into a kind of present emotional possession, an element of that idealized and sublimated portion of our experience with which all imaginative persons fill up the emptiness of their actual lives, and to which the poet is wont to give an objective embodiment ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... placed the hand-bag on the table, and opened it. I felt among the things at the top of it, but failed to touch the cigar-case. I shoved my hand in deeper, and stirred the things about, but still I did not reach it. A cold wave swept down my spine, and a sort of emptiness came to the pit of my stomach. Then I turned red-hot, and the sweat sprung out all over me. I wet my lips with my tongue, and said to myself, 'Don't be an ass. Pull yourself together, pull yourself together. Take the things out, one at a time. It's there, of course, ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... unpleasant sensation which one feels when going down in a lift: the sensation of the ground vanishing beneath you, the impression of emptiness, space. This time, it was the water retreating; and space opened ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... the religion of this mighty people, who, I was told, worshipped gods in the shape of men. I visited a shrine called the Temple of Heaven, hoping that there I should see such a god who was named Tien, but found in it nothing but splendid emptiness. ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... against Trevison for the Hester Harvey incident grew a sudden dull apathy—which presently threatened to become an aversion—for the West. Its crudeness, the uncouthness of its people; the emptiness, the monotony, began to oppress her. Noticing the waning of her enthusiasm, Agatha began to inject energetic condemnations of the country into her conversations with the girl, and to hint broadly of the contrasting ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... Nothing, no void Emptiness, in the Universe. From the upper or outer surface of our atmosphere to that of the Sun, and to those of the Planets and remote Stars, in different directions, Science has for hundreds of centuries ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... sighed across the heather and set the harsh grasses moaning eerily. The sky was somber overhead; scarred fell and towering pike had faded to blurs of dingy gray, and the ghostly whistling of curlew emphasized the emptiness of the darkening moor. The evening's mood suited Geoffrey's, and he rode slowly with loose bridle. The bouquet of the brandy had awakened within him a longing that he dreaded, and though, hitherto, he had been too intent ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... feeling suddenly, for the first time, the emptiness of body which occurs, perhaps in sympathy with the emptiness of death, and as I turned, I found myself in the position of the thing that had looked in at us. The stare of the Judge was still fixed upon ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... land is not far off, a forgotten island hidden in a wilderness of waters; but the gulls, the melancholy gulls, are the only sign you have of it. You see never a tramp, with its friendly smoke, no stately bark or trim schooner, not a fishing boat even: it is an empty desert; and presently the emptiness fills ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... at my wandering wits. This inactivity was death. The escaping air hissed in my ears. Our precious air, escaping away into the vacant desolation of the Lunar emptiness. Through one of the twisted, slanting dome-windows a rocky spire was visible. The Planetara lay bow-down, wedged in a jagged cradle of Lunar rock. A miracle that the hull and dome ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... modern operas, it stands in its dignified simplicity like the Parthenon beside the bewildering beauty of a Gothic cathedral; and its truth and grandeur are perhaps the more conspicuous because allied to one of those classic stories which even in Gluck's time had become almost synonymous with emptiness and formality. ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... murmured; "heavenly good!" Then she nestled among the cushions on the window seat, and, shielded by the heavy curtains from the emptiness of the room, ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... Paris—will ever be the battle-ground of true Liberty, or the scene of its real triumphs. I fear she does not know "how genuine glory is put on." Is that strength to be found in her which will not bend "but in magnanimous meekness"? Have not her "unceasing changes" as yet always brought "perpetual emptiness"? Has Paris the materials within her for thorough reform? Mean, dishonest Guizot being discarded, will any better successor be found for him than brilliant, ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... cards are all turned." It turned him sick, though, the emptiness of the boast. It was such a pitiful, ghastly bluff—for the cards were all against him, and he knew it. A man in Gilroy, Ohio, would take the trick which decided the game. Hearts were trumps, and Dr. Cecil ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... finish. It was not worth while. George Cannon had not understood. He did not feel as she felt, and her emotion was incommunicable to him. A tremendous misgiving seized her, and she had a physical feeling of emptiness in the stomach. It passed, swiftly as a hallucination. Just such a misgiving as visits nearly every normal person immediately before or immediately after marriage! She ignored it. She was engaged—that was the paramount fact! She was engaged, and ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... man who had stepped in and robbed them of their cause of warfare. Nevertheless they desired his company in their house. For each was anxious to study him and to discover what influence he was likely to have upon Catherine. During her daughter's absence Mrs. Ardagh had found the emptiness of her childless life insupportable, and she had, therefore, engaged a young girl, called Jenny Levita, to come to her every day as companion. Jenny was intelligent and very poor, bookish and earnest, even ardent in nature. Mrs. Ardagh gained a certain amount ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... in the opening scene: when Antigone and Ismene, robed all in white, entered together by the royal doorway and stood upon the upper plane of the great stage, alone—and yet so filled it that there was no sense of emptiness nor of lack of the ordinary scenery. Again, the setting was not an imitation, but the real thing. The palace from which the sisters had come forth rose stately behind them. Beside the stage, the branches of the fig-tree ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... by an emotion of pleasure. For instance, if a man sees that he is too keen in the pursuit of honour, let him think over its right use, the end for which it should be pursued, and the means whereby he may attain it. Let him not think of its misuse, and its emptiness, and the fickleness of mankind, and the like, whereof no man thinks except through a morbidness of disposition; with thoughts like these do the most ambitious most torment themselves, when they despair of gaining the distinctions they hanker after, and in thus giving vent to their ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... very painful to her. But her daughter wrote her three times a week and the other days she, herself, wrote to Virginia. Then she walked in the garden, read a little, and in this way managed to fill out the emptiness ...
— Three short works - The Dance of Death, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, A Simple Soul. • Gustave Flaubert
... extravagances, it will seem hard and repellant. But men who, like Thackeray, have seen life and tasted its bitterness and felt its hollowness, know how to prize it. Thackeray does not merely expose the cant, the emptiness, the self-seeking, the false pretenses, flunkeyism, and snobbery—the "mean admiration of mean things"—in the great world of London society: his keen, unsparing vision detects the base alloy in the purest natures. There are no "heroes" ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... no sooner comfortably seated in his compartment and congratulating himself upon its emptiness, which would permit of opportunity for sleep, when the door was thrown open and his tall companion of the early morning solemnly entered. Renwick did not know whether to be surprised or angry, and finished by being both, glancing at the intruder through his monocle in a manner ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... was startled to find these great roads so empty, as if a pestilence had swept through the city. Then he told himself that some degree of emptiness was natural; first because the snow-storm was even dangerously deep, and secondly because it was Sunday. And at the very word Sunday he bit his lip; the word was henceforth for hire like some indecent pun. Under ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... come out of hell by my private trap, and now write to you from my little place in purgatory. But I prefer hell: would I could always dig in those red coals—or else be at sea in a schooner, bound for isles unvisited: to be on shore and not to work is emptiness—suicidal vacancy. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... brought much work and another banquet with a toast to the Prison-Governor—the prisoners were still unremembered. In the evening solitude, emptiness, coldness. He felt a pressing need to talk to her. He fetched some notepaper and sat down to write. But at the very outset he was confronted by a difficulty. How was he to address her? Whenever he had sent her a few lines to say that he would not be home for dinner, he had always ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... six girls all answered they were happy because the "work takes up your mind," and generally added, "It's awful lonesome at home," or "there is an awful emptiness at home." However, one girl with nine brothers and sisters was happy in the collar packing room just because "it was so awful lonesome"—she could enjoy her own thoughts. An Irishwoman at another laundry who had married an Italian said, "Sure I am always happy. It leaves me no time to think." ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... so; it presents a salutary contrast to what, unfortunately, meets our eyes every day in the newspapers and magazines. Look at the gilded and painted exterior displayed by any large community, and think what it really conceals!—emptiness and rottenness, if I may say so; no foundation of morality beneath it. In a word, these large communities of ...
— Pillars of Society • Henrik Ibsen
... on black shoes and white stockings, with pink garters, and they almost always toed in a little. They looked so cold in the window with nothing but a "shimmy" on, and fairly ached to be dressed, and nursed, and sung to. The little girls outside the window felt an emptiness in the hollow of their left arms as they gazed. There was one big doll in the middle all dressed up. It had real hair that you could comb, and it was wax. Pure wax! Yes, sir. And it could open and shut its eyes, and if you squeezed its stomach ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... gave permission. The monk gathered the sheets together, and thrust them carelessly into his pouch, so that the roll stuck out at the top. When he had gone, Conrad gazed sadly into emptiness and longed for his manuscript. How happy he had been with it all those weeks! What would the priest think of it? Everything would be wrong. Such people see their God with other eyes than ours. And if he criticised it, all the pleasure would go out ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... face sobered as he rode along. It seemed to him that the sleepy little meadows, the quiet murmuring of the creek, even the soft rustling of the cottonwood leaves breathed a new loneliness, an emptiness where the man who had called this place home, who had clung to it in the face of opposition that was growing into open warfare, had lived and had left life suddenly—unwarrantably, Lone knew in his heart. It might ...
— The Quirt • B.M. Bower
... leisure; and for Mrs. Ware, who shared all the joys and sorrows of her husband, the twelve years that follow brought a settled existence and very much happiness. Neither her own health nor that of her husband was ever very firm, and there was always a great emptiness in the family purse, but with Mrs. Ware, these were, as with Paul, "light afflictions" which were but for a moment, and she did not let them disturb ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... across the years, full of struggle, of triumph, of emptiness, of fulfillment, to a night in another world; a world of dreams, magic associations, high and peaceful ambitions, into which had broken a voice and an appeal from the darkness. He had turned the light upon himself then that she might see him for what ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... upper floor in the lead. Janice followed with a queer feeling of emptiness at her heart—the first symptom ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... pitied as insane, avoided as cynical, or passed over as frivolous. And yet, but for one reason, to that whole European world whose progress we are now inheriting, this view would have seemed not only not untenable, but even obvious. The emptiness of the things of this life, the incompleteness of even its highest pleasures, and their utter powerlessness to make us really happy, has been, at least for fifteen hundred years, a commonplace, both with saints and sages. The conception that anything ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... sublime, horrible, but it was not humorous. I leave it to you. What is there laughable in the sight of a pain-distraught fish rolling helplessly on the surface of the sea and exposing to the sun all its essential emptiness? ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... and desire, hours of poetry to outweigh years, joys to make a man serve a lifetime for one gracious gesture,—all this is to be buried in the tedium of a tame, commonplace marriage, to vanish in the emptiness of an existence which you will come to loath! I hate your children before they are born. ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... is, overhead. There was nothing there but vast stretches of emptiness—at first. Then he saw that this emptiness was lined and laced with filmy striations, like cellophane. They bore a strange resemblance to his "doodlings," as though that strange faculty of his enabled him to somehow perceive this place of the fourth dimension. And instinctively Harper knew that ...
— The 4-D Doodler • Graph Waldeyer
... not loved. I'm not even sure I know what those terms mean, because I'm not sure I ever thought anything was beautiful, I'm not sure I ever loved anything. I only read about such things in books. But I know I felt the emptiness inside me where those things should ...
— The Highest Treason • Randall Garrett
... of it, you know. My cousin married a Washington belle, and I had to be there a week, and take it all in. Ah well, this is a threadbare theme; but I could understand how men fifteen hundred years ago fled from Alexandrian ball-rooms to Nitrian deserts. The emptiness of it—the eternal simper, the godless and harrowing routine! If a man has brains or a soul about him, what can he do with them in such a crowd? Better leave them at home with his pocket-book, or he might lose them—less suddenly, but more certainly, ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... of an ashen autumn day some years ago I was standing outside the station at Oxford intending to take the train to London. And for some reason, out of idleness or the emptiness of my mind or the emptiness of the pale grey sky, or the cold, a kind of caprice fell upon me that I would not go by that train at all, but would step out on the road and walk at least some part of the way to London. I do not ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... of the whole conversation. The whole thing strengthened in me that obscure feeling of life being but a waste of days, which, half-unconsciously, had driven me out of a comfortable berth, away from men I liked, to flee from the menace of emptiness . . . and to find inanity at the first turn. Here was a man of recognized character and achievement disclosed as an absurd and dreary chatterer. And it was probably like this everywhere—from east to west, from the bottom to the ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... saved are with Christ and the holy angels before the throne, and follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth, it is to be remembered that on earth all is desolation and emptiness. The wicked have been slain by the glory of Christ's coming. By the quaking of the earth the cities of the nations have fallen in ruin, islands have been removed, and mountains cast into the depths of the sea. The condition of the earth during this time of desolation is thus ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... and distinguished himself as a speaker. Ben Jonson, the dramatist, says of him "There happened in my time one noble speaker who was full of gravity in his speaking. No man ever spoke more neatly, more presly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. His hearers could not cough or look aside from him without loss. The fear of every man that heard him was lest he should make an end." This speaking was valuable training for Bacon in writing the pithy sentences of his Essays. A man who uses the long, ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... often to talk, and it was the glory of his family. It had cost him so much trouble that he had all but brought about a congestion of the mind in the writing of it. He tried to persuade himself that it was a work of genius, but he knew perfectly well with what emptiness of thought it had been written, and he dared not look again at the manuscript, because every time he did so he recognized in the phrases that he had thought to be his own, rags taken from other authors, painfully pieced together haphazard. ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... ever in the least jealous of the military successes of the league, which caused such gnashing of teeth in Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest, is a mischievous fiction, the emptiness of which was evident to any one who happened to be in Russia ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... No voice nor vision know; Her stately piles with all their height and pride Now languished and died, And Bethl'em's humble cots above them stept While all her seers slept; Her cedar fir, hewed stones, and gold were all Polluted through their fall; And those once sacred mansions were now Mere emptiness and show. This made the angel call at reeds and thatch, Yet where the shepherds watch, And God's own lodging, though he could not lack, To be a common rack. No costly pride, no soft-clothed luxury In those thin cells could lie; Each stirring wind and storm ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... us the thing as it is. There is not a single one of these characters whom we have not met. Their poor shifts at self-deceit are painfully familiar to us. In the company of this keen-eyed detective we can follow human selfishness and cowardice through all their disguises. The emptiness of conventional respectabilities and pieties and the futility of the spasmodic attempts ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... stage has arisen from an irresistible longing for the new and extraordinary. Man, oppressed by divided cares, and satiated with sensual pleasure, felt an emptiness or want. Man, neither altogether satisfied with the senses, nor forever capable of thought, wanted a middle state, a bridge between the two states, bringing them into harmony. Beauty and aesthetics supplied that for him. But a good lawgiver is not satisfied with discovering ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... for a while about the garden, vaguely and without purpose. The church-bell had stopped ringing; the stillness was complete. This young lady relished highly, on occasions, the sense of being alone—the absence of the whole family and the emptiness of the house. To-day, apparently, the servants had also gone to church; there was never a figure at the open windows; behind the house there was no stout negress in a red turban, lowering the bucket into the great shingle-hooded ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... wrathfully. "Puff puff, puff, thou thing of straw and emptiness! thou rag or two! thou meal-bag! thou pumpkin-head! thou nothing! Where shall I find a name vile enough to call thee by? Puff, I say, and suck in thy fantastic life along with the smoke, else I snatch the pipe from thy mouth and hurl thee where ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... are pleasant, or mild tasted, are proper for nourishing the body. We are therefore excited or prompted to receive nourishment by the pleasant smell or taste of the food; but the avidity with which we take it depends much on the state of the stomach, and likewise on a certain inanition or emptiness; for the coarsest food is grateful to those who are hungry, and whose digestion is good; whereas, to those who have lately eaten, or whose digestive powers are impaired, the most delicate food affords little pleasure. While we ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... The emptiness and disarray of the little room, flooded by the sunbeams, were producing in Trent a sense of gruesomeness. His fancy called up a picture of a haggard man dressing himself in careful silence by the first light of dawn, glancing constantly at the inner ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... dreadful day was over. The crowd dispersed. Even the auctioneer went at last, and as he closed the door with a bang, the reverberation that went through the suite gave evidence of its emptiness. ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... tawdry frippery, and sits in her lonely chamber, glowering at the image of the young rival who has won all the applause,—when she bemoans her waning charms and the wearisome life which has lost its sparkle, and sees its emptiness and hollowness,—does she not look wistfully at that little flame which flickers on her hollowing cheek, from which the stage-blush has been washed, and think the game a losing one? The Senator lives near by, and that is Madame's room over the way. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... was a real misfortune as far as I was concerned. For only then did I come to realize how much I was attached to the girl. I felt an utter emptiness in my heart; I began to feel myself a total stranger in the house. When everybody was talking merrily, I kept quiet, as if I were a mourner. I was always looking for Marusya, I was always trying to catch her ...
— In Those Days - The Story of an Old Man • Jehudah Steinberg
... north-east corner of the city in a (large) curving (space) Jivaka built a vihara in the garden of Ambapali,(11) and invited Buddha with his 1250 disciples to it, that he might there make his offerings to support them. (These places) are still there as of old, but inside the city all is emptiness and desolation; no man ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... worn with a slight backward tilt, his hair had been carefully brushed into respectful sleekness; for his business was with an Embassy. And Mr Verloc, steady like a rock—a soft kind of rock—marched now along a street which could with every propriety be described as private. In its breadth, emptiness, and extent it had the majesty of inorganic nature, of matter that never dies. The only reminder of mortality was a doctor's brougham arrested in august solitude close to the curbstone. The polished knockers of the doors gleamed as far as the eye could reach, the clean windows shone with ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... on every side men and women who try to fill an emptiness, a wanting that they feel within themselves, by every sort of means except the only one which can ever be a permanent success. Women devote themselves to lovers, husbands, children, dress, society, ...
— The Romance of the Soul • Lilian Staveley
... not worthy to touch your hand, as pure as it is white, but will you not forgive me the folly of my past life, and let me live in hope that I may do better? I swear from this day forth to cast off the old life, with all its emptiness and folly, and lay ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... hate that distilled a corrosive virtue into the commonplace words like a drop of powerful poison falling into a glass of water; but my thoughts dwelt upon that sunrise. I could imagine under the pellucid emptiness of the sky these four men imprisoned in the solitude of the sea, the lonely sun, regardless of the speck of life, ascending the clear curve of the heaven as if to gaze ardently from a greater height at his own splendour reflected in the still ocean. ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... to carry him in. We laid him on the couch. The lamp smoked, the fire was out, the chill of the stormy night oozed from the cheerless yellow paper on the wall. 'Amy!' I called aloud, and my voice seemed to lose itself in the emptiness of this tiny house as if I had cried in a desert. He opened his eyes. 'Gone!' he said distinctly. 'I had only asked for water—only for a ...
— Amy Foster • Joseph Conrad
... of inspiration from the garrulity of hopeless nescience; who forgets that it is half an epic poem filled with the gorgeous imagery of the Orient, may, like the ass which Balaam rode, open its mouth and speak; but he never saw the Angel of the Lord; he utters the words of emptiness ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... sitting-room was, by a creative touch and a magnetic presence such as few women possess. I believe that she could not be for twenty-four hours in the barrenest and ugliest room possible, without contriving to diffuse a certain enchantment through all its emptiness. ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... it, he said, amongst other things, that he had often discussed with his friend the Mayor the philosophy of money. "I recollect very well," he said, "once entering into the question with him, when I was twenty years younger than I am now, and saying that I saw a great deal of emptiness about this money-getting; that many were striving for that which they thought would make them happy, but that it was like a bubble upon the water—no sooner caught than burst.... Had I," he afterwards said, "been of noble birth, or traced my origin (like some in this room) to those who came in ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... incapable of understanding a character like mine, or the exalted, ennobling principles that govern me. They crave the applause of this world, they are satisfied with fine clothes, fine houses, fine equipages. They think and talk of nothing else; I have not one idea in common with them. I see the emptiness and hollowness of these things. I am absolutely unworldly; my ambition is to attain whatever they, in their blind ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... paradox which is perhaps a permanent menace. The great creed born in the desert creates a kind of ecstasy out of the very emptiness of its own land, and even, one may say, out of the emptiness of its own theology. It affirms, with no little sublimity, something that is not merely the singleness but rather the solitude of God. There ...
— Lord Kitchener • G. K. Chesterton
... out?" Lemson asked, more of the emptiness than of his companion. "It's ten minutes since the scheduled ending. Do you suppose the ...
— The Premiere • Richard Sabia
... produce, in proper quantity, the natural digestive fluid, and also unable to absorb the food which it may imperfectly digest, is in constant anxiety and irritation. It is oppressed with the sense of nausea; it is oppressed with the sense of emptiness and prostration; it is oppressed with a sense of distention; it is oppressed with a loathing for food, and it is teased with a craving for more drink. Thus there is engendered, a permanent disorder which, for politeness' sake, is called dyspepsia, ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... His fury, bent alone with eager haste To swallow it; so dropp'd the loathsome cheeks Of demon Cerberus, who thund'ring stuns The spirits, that they for deafness wish in vain. We, o'er the shades thrown prostrate by the brunt Of the heavy tempest passing, set our feet Upon their emptiness, that substance seem'd. They all along the earth extended lay Save one, that sudden rais'd himself to sit, Soon as that way he saw us pass. "O thou!" He cried, "who through the infernal shades art led, Own, if again thou know'st me. Thou wast fram'd Or ere my frame was ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... another type, or order, of density. But now comes the startling part of the investigation: we might expect matter to be a densification of this koilon; it is nothing of the kind. Matter is not koilon, but the absence of koilon, and at first sight, matter and space appear to have changed places, and emptiness has become solidity, solidity has ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... eyes to the stars. The world seemed young and sweet about them, clean and tender, a place of infinite peace and kindness rather than of a pursuing hate. They stood close together; their shoulders brushed companionably. Together they hearkened to a tiny voice thrilling through the emptiness, the monotonous vibrating cadences of some happy insect. The heat of the day had passed with the day, the perfect hour had come. It was one of those moments which Jim Kendric found to his liking. Many such still hours had he known under many skies and out of the night had always come something ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... world in which neither parental nor filial love were more than the names of nonentities—Father, Son, Daughter, Child, but empty syllables, which philosophy heeded not—or rather loved them in their emptiness, but despised, hated, or feared them, when for a moment they seemed pregnant with a meaning from heaven, and each in ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... congeries of living souls were a strangling limitation. There are certain human temperaments, and my own is one of them, whose aesthetic sense demands the existence of vast interminable spaces of air, of water, of earth, of fire, or even of blank emptiness. To such a temperament it might seem as though to be jostled throughout eternity by other living souls were to be shut up in an unescapable prison. And when to this unending population of fellow-denizens of space we add this doctrine that ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... does not Ben Jonson sum up just those characteristics which extempore composition (even the best) entirely wants, when he tells us of Bacon that 'no man ever wrote more neatly, more pressly; nor suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in that he uttered?' I take it for granted, that the highest human composition is that which embodies most thought, experience, and feeling; and that must be produced ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... Naturally, Moloch-self is the god he serves. To enjoy a little brief authority, he would enslave universal mankind, and declare, as Solomon did, after exhausting the catalogue of tyranny and libertinism, "all is vanity"—emptiness! Thus, it is dangerous to confide in the humanity of man. To place in his hands a weapon so all-powerful as land, is to place him upon a pinnacle from whose vast altitude he can, will, and does ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... suddenly seized with immoderate laughter not untinctured with hysteria, loud and full of emptiness, as if she were shouting for ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... sound of his knuckles on the door rang out hollowly, as if there was nothing but emptiness within. While he waited he turned on the step and looked idly at the courtyard. The inwalled ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... to obtain his release. The Court and the Emperor were extremely polite, but Margaret soon recognised the emptiness of their protestations of good-will. "They all tell me that they love the King," she wrote, "but I have little proof of it. If I had to do with honest folks, who understand what honour is, I should not care, but it ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... so! So I'm to keep watch inside, am I? You aren't afraid anyone'll walk away with the house, are you? I vow we've got nothing else there for thieves to take— all full of emptiness as it is, ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... corners. Her sense of direction told her that they had entered an extreme wing of the house, hidden away among the thickest trees of the garden, and to all appearances unused. The place was damp, dusty, and silent, with the intense silence of emptiness. Some of the doors were open, showing unfurnished, neglected rooms. The papers were peeling off the walls; the fittings were covered with the rust and dirt of years; the soiled blinds half covered the closed, uncleaned windows. The atmosphere was ...
— The Crooked House • Brandon Fleming
... bad a place, after all," mumbled Peter, as he warmed himself at the fire and the flask; then, taking out his violin, he began to play. The echo of his music emphasized the emptiness of the house, the damp got into the strings so that they sounded tubby, and there were unintentional quavers in the melody whenever the trees swung against the windows and splashed them with rain, or when a distant shutter fell ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... no chairs, have the appearance of being almost empty. In the centre of this emptiness at Gagri church two trestles were put up, and the open coffin placed upon them; in the coffin, lying in a bed of fresh flowers and dressed in delicate white garments, was a little dead child. The coffin was perfectly and even marvellously arranged; ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... room with terror in her eyes; the silence, the emptiness now alarmed her. What was she to say when his son came back from the army? What was she to tell him about his father? Would he believe her? Wouldn't he point at her with his fingers and say, "She's done it"? Oh, what was the meaning of this ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig
... leave of her, Miss Laniston gave my hand a vigorous pressure, which seemed to me to indicate that her intentions were better than her words. As I went away my mind was quieter, though not cheered. There was in it a certain void and emptiness, but this was compensated for by a sense of self-approbation which was strengthening and comforting. I was even able to smile at the notion of the interview between Miss Laniston and Sister Sarah, when the former should propose ...
— The House of Martha • Frank R. Stockton
... distaste for the gay society which was mainly a flutter of ribbons and talk and pretty faces; and when she meditated, as she did in her spare moments, her heart was sore over the frivolity of life and the emptiness of fashion. She longed to make the world better, and without any priggishness she set it an example of simplicity and sobriety, of cheerful acquiescence in ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... to play his music, this book will be invaluable, as giving a deep insight into the meaning and proper mode of rendering his compositions. To those who know nothing of him, and who are still floundering amid the fade and flimsy productions that would fain hide their emptiness and vulgarity under the noble name of music, this life of a true musician will reveal a new world, a new purpose for the drudgery of daily practice, and the expenditure of time, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... people seemed only to enhance the cool brown emptiness of the church, the rows and rows of empty pews, disengaged prayerbooks and abandoned hassocks. It had the effect of a preposterous misfit. Johnson consulted with a thin-legged, short-skirted verger about the disposition of the party. The officiating clergy appeared distantly ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... jet streaked skyward once more. Sparks sped from the formation. They flared through emptiness where the Mahon jet had been but now was not. It scuttled abruptly to one side as concerted streams of sparks converged. They missed. It darted into zestful, exuberant maneuverings, remarkably like a dog dashing madly here and ...
— The Machine That Saved The World • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... shall be done. This settles it. They used to fetch and carry for me, and now . . . I've licked their boots, have I? I'm their man, their tool, their chattel. It's the bottom rung of the ladder of shame. I sound with my foot, and there's nothing underneath but the black emptiness of damnation. Ah, Deacon, Deacon, and so this is where you've been travelling all these years; and it's for this that you learned French! The gallows . . . God help me, it begins to dog me like my shadow. THERE'S a step to take! And the jerk upon your ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson
... the name upon the card—followed the servant across the white stone circular hall, with its banked-up profusion of hothouse flowers and its air of elegant emptiness, into a somewhat austere but very dignified apartment, the walls of which were lined ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... black, with myriads of stars. The ground was white. But it was not really ground at all, it was ice that covered everything—twenty miles north to the Barrier, and southward to the Pole itself, past towering mountains and howling emptiness and cold beyond imagining. ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... by the weight of centuries, he leans Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, The emptiness of ages in his face, And on his back the ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... Within is emptiness: the sunlight falls On faded journals papering its walls; On advertisement chromos, torn with time, Around a hearth where wasps and spiders build.— The house is dead; meseems that night of crime It, too, was ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... mother,—his conversation with the Archbishop, in which he had felt much more excitement than he was willing to admit,—his dream wherein he had been so painfully impressed with a sense of the desertion, emptiness, and end of the world, and finally his discovery of the little lonely and apparently forsaken boy, thrown despairingly as it were against the closed Cathedral, like a frail human wreck cast up from the gulf of the ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... without ceasing some pilot passion to which we can surrender our heavy burden of freedom. The dry-rot destruction of this individualistic age has worm-eaten into marriage; we have sought to drown pain and the exhaustion of our souls, to fill emptiness with pleasure, to place the personal good in marriage above the racial duty, to forget responsibility, to arrogate for the unimportant Self, and, in so doing, inevitably we have turned away from essential things. Can't you see that we are so terribly tired of this search for something ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... contemplation of the Absolute—to treat Him as only a step in the ladder. This is an error of false Mysticism; the true mystic follows St. Paul in choosing as his ultimate goal the fulness of Christ, and not the emptiness ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... beyond rose a small hill. This the coach mounted, and the red gold of the smoldering sun engulfed it. Was it a face I saw at the window? Perhaps. Then over the hill all disappeared, and with it the whole world, and I stood in emptiness, alone. ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... had died, brooding over the emptiness of his great triumph. His son the Black Prince had died, cursing the falsity of Frenchmen. England also had gone through the great tragedy of the Black Death and her people, like those of France, had been driven to the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various |
