"Emptiness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... all. Three rooms, stranger than these, even in their emptiness, it would be hard to imagine. In Egypt, in India, they would not be entirely out of place, but here in Paris, in a commonplace hotel, in the Rue M. ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... structural distinctions between man and the apes remain, upon which so much stress has been laid, that they require careful consideration, in order that the true value may be assigned to those which are real, and the emptiness of those which are fictitious may be exposed. I refer to the characters of the hand, the ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... as the light; to us reveal Our emptiness and woe; And lead us in those paths of life Where all the ...
— The Otterbein Hymnal - For Use in Public and Social Worship • Edmund S. Lorenz
... his rooms, he felt a sensation that had sometimes come upon him after a long day's hunting, a feeling of deadly fatigue and stifling emptiness, as if the rest of his body were drained of the blood that choked his heart. He opened his travelling-bag, took out a large silver flask, looked at it, sighed, shuddered slightly, poured about two tablespoonfuls ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... a young boy's mind is often not taken into account, at least emptiness so far as all knowledge in it being of a fragmentary and piecemeal description, nothing complete. It may well happen that an intelligent boy shall be unable to understand a seemingly simple thing, ...
— Children and Their Books • James Hosmer Penniman
... spirits faintly revived, on the approach of spring. She was weary of dissipation: the glittering bubble, which at first charmed her eye, had burst, and betrayed its emptiness. She had a mind which panted for the noblest attainments, a heart formed for the enjoyment of every pure and rational pursuit. Her thoughts continually reverted to the first happy months of her union with De Courcy; and she impatiently anticipated the moment, when they should ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... the troubles of her disturbed mind to Jill, who tried to show her sympathy by licking her face. At night, she would often waken out of a deep sleep with a start, when her eagerly outstretched arms would grasp a vast emptiness. The sight of lovers walking together would bring hot blood to her head; the proximity of a young man would ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... turned from green to yellow gradually like a great unripe fruit. All around the sunken sun it was like a lemon; round all the east it was a sort of golden green, more suggestive of a greengage; but the whole had still the emptiness of daylight and none of the secrecy of dusk. Tumbled here and there across this gold and pale green were shards and shattered masses of inky purple cloud, which seemed falling towards the earth in every kind of colossal perspective. One of them really had the character of some many-mitred, ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... 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
... the square below where, in the Grand' Place, those doughty Knights of the Golden Fleece had gathered before the pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Now a few dwarfed, black figures of peasants crawled like insects across the wide emptiness of it. Here among the startled jackdaws I lounged smoking and ruminating upon the bells, oily Cerberus, and his lonely task, and inhaling the misty air from the winding canals in the fertile green fields below—appraising the values of the pale diaphanous sky of misty blue, harmonizing ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... I am not set against her. Nothing in the world but her own emptiness and impossibility of being anything ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... awkward, crawling progress up the ladder into the conning tower just above, Keith helping from behind. When they stood before the exit port on the lee side, Wells shot back its bolts and the door swung open, revealing the black emptiness of the water chamber. The commander gazed for a second into Bowman's eyes. The ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... to the door and opened it. She looked down the passage, then, satisfied as to its emptiness, returned to ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... slightly, seemed to wince back. Girlie, at the gate of Number 18 Cottonwood Avenue, had stopped to watch them pass. Girlie did not speak. Her face looked smitten, the ripe fruit had turned bitter upon her ruddy lips. The tranquil emptiness of her beauty had ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... unmarried women, so many empty, monotonous lives. I think the condition of England's country villages is becoming almost a tragedy; all the men seem to have gone away to a bigger and wider world, and all the women to have been left behind to feed on emptiness. There are the clergyman's daughters, the doctor's daughters, the solicitor's daughters, and perhaps a few retired veterans and their daughters; all struggling through the same old empty round; while the men go out to conquer the earth." She paused a moment, but seeing Meryl's rapt attention, ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... and the sumptuous St. Augustine, which was brought to the villa in a barrow by a little dealer, there was a longer interval. Meanwhile the frame had been reconstructed, and a niche for the missing saint rose in melancholy emptiness. A little before the sensational rencontre in Emma's den, the chance of finding a rude pilgrim woodcut on the Quai Voltaire revealed the saint's identity. This ugly print informed the faithful that the "prodigious image" of Our Lady existed in the Church of the Carmelites at Borgo San Liberale. ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... there shining a little pink, a little green; gorse, furze-bushes by the deep banks of the river, or a few boschetti with dusty leaves, which feebly stand out upon the blondness of the soil. To the right, a pine forest. To the left, the undulations of the Roman hills expire into an emptiness infinitely sad. Afar, the violet scheme of the Alban mountains, with veiled and dream-like distances, shape indefinitely against the pearl light, limpid and serene, ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... bottom lands as the sun slid down behind the 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 ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... and religious. What is a man or a civilisation without mysticism and religion? They are like a painted landscape on paper. You enjoy it from a distance, but when you touch it you are disappointed. Everything without God is discontentment, emptiness. ...
— The Religious Spirit of the Slavs (1916) - Sermons On Subjects Suggested By The War, Third Series • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... Beyond this, further meditation and fasting—by which was meant living solely on fish, fruit, wine, and meat—one presently attained to complete Swaraj or Control of Self, and might in time pass into the absolute Nirvana, or the Negation of Emptiness, the supreme goal ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... 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 ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... over now. I've lived through the game of Christmas solitaire in a big city, and I feel as relieved as a man just getting out of a dentist's office. He's minus a few molars, and aches considerable, but he's full of a pleasing emptiness. ...
— Colonel Crockett's Co-operative Christmas • Rupert Hughes
... 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 ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... an impression that a large sum was usually kept there, but the doctor had paid a heavy corn bill in cash only that very day, and it was conjectured that it was to this and not to a robber that the emptiness of the box was due. One thing in the room was missing—but that one thing was suggestive. The portrait of Miss Morton, which had always stood upon the side-table, had been taken from its frame, and carried off. Mrs. Woods had observed it there when she waited upon her employer that evening, ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... is also an overwhelming conviction of the transitory character of the external world, and the emptiness of ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... might well have been dizzy. Evidently he knew him self, and even in his brief experience with the world he understood how uncertain and evanescent are the winds of Fame. If he had ever suffered from a "swelled head," he was now cured. He felt the emptiness of life's prizes when the dearest who should have shared them with ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... music; and when you have collected your audience, just at the moment when their minds are erect with expectation, let it be reported that a state criminal of high rank is on the point of being executed in the adjoining square; in a moment the emptiness of the theatre would demonstrate the comparative weakness of the imitative arts, and proclaim the ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... I knew them, and I knew them very well at one time, they were all form, and ceremony, and outside show, in whatever they did, until they were far, very far advanced in years, and had been made, through many losses and sorrows, to feel the emptiness of all worldly things. But I have reason to hope that the eyes of some of them were then opened to think and hope for better things than this life can give; but I shall speak of them as they were when Evelyn was under their care, and when I was ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... blue, sickly rag half torn from the wick. "Ouf! Mort d'aieul!" he would mutter. "But I must count my wine to-night." And so he came down into the wide cellars, and trod tiptoe among the big round tuns. With a wooden mallet he tapped them, and shook his head to hear the hollow humming that their emptiness gave forth. No oath came from him at all, for the matter was too grievous. The darkness that filled everywhere save just next to the candle, pressed harder and harder upon him. He looked at the door which led from inside here out into the night, and it was comfortable to know how thick ...
— The Dragon of Wantley - His Tale • Owen Wister
... into the innocent youth, and fancies she sees in him again the Savior whom she had once laughed at. She tells him with heartrending truth her inextinguishable suffering, her eternal sorrow, her lamentation full of the laughter of derision, the whole wide emptiness of her misery, and implores him to be merciful, and let her weep for a single hour upon his pure bosom—for a single hour to be his. But the answer comes like the voice of an avenging God, ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... beach and its desolation—its emptiness. It was as though a crowd of people had suddenly vanished from it; a crowd that any moment might return. The place seemed waiting ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... up the dishes which were standing as she had left them after the early breakfast. Jean helped her. When the work was over there seemed nothing left but the aching emptiness of waiting. ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... out of tune. What music will be in him when Hector has knocked out his brains, I know not, nor I care not; but if emptiness makes noise, his head will ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... 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 ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... to look, moving like a creature in a dream, against her will, followed. There was nothing to be seen. The blank, the vacancy, went to her heart. She no longer thought of Connie or her vision. She felt the emptiness with a desolation such as she had never felt before. She loosed her arm with something like impatience from the child's close clasp. For months she had not entered the room which was associated with so much of her life. ...
— Old Lady Mary - A Story of the Seen and the Unseen • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... past the gateway to listen. There was still no one to be seen in the square. It lay white and windswept, a barricade of emptiness; to one side the spaceport and the white skyscraper of the Terran Headquarters, and at the other side, the clutter of low buildings, the street-shrine, the little spaceport cafe smelling of coffee and jaco, and the dark opening mouths of streets that rambled down ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... 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 know if other people are ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... advantage rests with the lower classes, for they seldom fail to give a certain character of rude poetry to their thoughts. Perhaps also this same observation may explain the sterility of the salons, their emptiness, their shallowness, and the repugnance felt by men of ability for bartering their ideas for such pitiful ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... smart, that—for such is the nature of the best men, even of the very best—at the moment when Winsome threw herself, dazed and blinded with pain, upon her low white bed in the little darkened chamber over the hill at Craig Ronald, Ralph was once more, even though with the gnaw of emptiness and loss in his heart, looking forward to the future, and planning what the day would bring to him on ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... present to wise Minos. I wish Mercury were here; he would damn him for his dulness. I have a good mind to carry him to the Danaides, and leave him to pour water into their vessels which, like his late readers, are destined to eternal emptiness. Or shall I chain him to the rock, side to side by Prometheus, not for having attempted to steal celestial fire, in order to animate human forms, but for having endeavoured to extinguish that which ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... was terrible. The emptiness pressed upon him like a weight that crushed from him his youth and his strength and all his youthful optimism, and left him old and weak and faded, a shadow of humanity like those shadows down ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... Eastport, in the state of Maine, lay buried under a deep snow that was newly fallen. The customary bustle in the streets was wanting. One could look long distances down them and see nothing but a dead-white emptiness, with silence to match. Of course I do not mean that you could see the silence—no, you ...
— Quotations from the Works of Mark Twain • David Widger
... Buddhism than Buddha taught, a broader Christianity than Christ revealed, a deeper Spiritual philosophy than Swedenborg or Davis heralded. Of course we welcome the opening day and its new light and promise, for the old theologies are wearisome emptiness and humbug, and the new isms cold and repellant or insufficient in their testimony. We do not expect that a new church will arise and a new sectarianism follow. But a new conception of life, its origin, purpose and destiny may come to lift the people ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, December 1887 - Volume 1, Number 11 • Various
... man's eagerness to serve him. He knew well that secretly in his heart his Mahommedan butler had always deplored the severely monastic style in which he had lived, the absence of women in his master's bungalow, the emptiness of his arms that should have had to bear his master's children, and that he now was ready to welcome heartily ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... The emptiness and uncertainty of all those systems, whether venerable for their antiquity, or agreeable for their novelty, he has evidently shown; and not only declared, but proved, that we are entirely ignorant of the principles of things, and that all the knowledge ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... shrinking, that it would go on glowing after she was gone. And she would go presently. This spontaneous rushing to his aid was merely what a girl like that, with generous impulses and quick sympathy, would do for any one in dire need. She would leave behind her an inescapable longing, an emptiness, a memory of sweetly disturbing visions. MacRae seemed to see with remarkable clarity and sureness that he would be penalized for yielding to that bewitching fancy. By what magic had she so suddenly made ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... we see the emptiness Of all this world contains; And here we feel the blessedness ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... feet fingering their heads, and under that heavy cupola were made the long ablutions of the faithful. But now no man comes to this old place, no murmur to God disturbs the heavy silence. And the silence, and the emptiness, and the greyness under the long arcades, all seem to make a tremulous proclamation; all seem to whisper, "I am very old, I am useless, I cumber the earth." Even the mosque of Amru, which stands also on ground that looks gone to waste, near dingy and squat houses ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... interrupted the rear-admiral, "and they who have ever known them, know their emptiness; most especially as they approach that verge of existence whence the eye looks in a near and fearful glance, over the vast and unknown ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... (from my nineteenth year to my eight-and-twentieth) we lived seduced and seducing, deceived and deceiving, in divers lusts; openly, by sciences which they call liberal; secretly, with a false-named religion; here proud, there superstitious, every where vain. Here, hunting after the emptiness of popular praise, down even to theatrical applauses, and poetic prizes, and strifes for grassy garlands, and the follies of shows, and the intemperance of desires. There, desiring to be cleansed from these defilements, by carrying food to those who were called "elect" and "holy," out of which, ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... small, very much alone. The infinite wastes of yellow desert danced in heat waves against the bronze-blue sky. The girl saw no sign of living thing save a buzzard that swept lazily across the zenith. She turned dizzily from contemplating the vast emptiness about her to a close scrutiny of her injured foot. She drew off her thin satin house slipper painfully and dropped it unheedingly into a bunch of yucca that crowded against the rock. Her silk stocking followed. Then she sat in helpless misery, eying ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... and with a plan for putting it to use as a means of escape, Jack, unable to turn about in the narrow passage, worked his way backward until the projection of his feet into emptiness warned him he had reached the room. Then he let himself down and, when once more with his companions, explained the nature of ...
— The Radio Boys with the Revenue Guards • Gerald Breckenridge
... The emptiness of some of my colleagues, and their worldliness, too, were almost incredible. There was one who was particularly silly. He was a blond youth with greyish eyes, a mouth not quite shut, and an eternal simper upon his face. He never had an idea in his head, and never read anything ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... that night seemed to me then, and still seems to me, much more a dream than a reality: I being utterly wearied by my long hard day's work in scrambling about among the wrecks, and a little light-headed because of my stomach's emptiness, and feverish because of my growing thirst, and my mind stunned by the dull pain of my despair. And it was lucky for me, I suppose, that my thinking powers were so feeble and so blunted. Had I been ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... by the emptiness of the Ladies' Gallery, it then proceeded with great freedom to discuss a proposal for the employment of women and young persons ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 8, 1920 • Various
... divers times by pestilence, famine, and war. It suffered cruelly in the war with the Genoese in 1380, when it was taken by those enemies of St. Mark; and its people were so wasted by the struggle that the Venetians, on regaining it, were obliged to invite immigration to repopulate its emptiness. I do not know how great comfort the Chiozzotti of that unhappy day took in the fact that some of the earliest experiments with cannon were made in the contest that destroyed them, but I can hardly offer them less tribute than to mention it here. At present the place is peopled ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... And, finally, he says that his prophecies are true and right; that the heathenish prophets commit an unrighteousness by performing something else than that which they promised to perform. To declare righteousness is to declare that which is righteous, which does not conceal internal emptiness and rottenness under a fair outside. The words: "I the Lord speak righteousness, I declare rectitude," could not but have died on the lips of the "great unknown."—In chap. xlvi. 8-13 the apostates in Israel are addressed. They are exhorted to return to the true God, and to be mindful, ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... hysterical emotion which is utterly impotent to energise into nobilities of service and miracles of consecration, but it is the affiance of the whole nature which spreads itself before Him and prays, 'Fill my emptiness and vitalise me with Thine own Spirit.' That is the faith which is ever answered by the inrush of the divine power, and the measure of our capacity of receiving is the measure of His ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... So far I have given impressions of the most motley things merely as they came, in chronological and not in logical order; the first flying vision of Islam as a sort of sea, with something both of the equality and the emptiness and the grandeur of its purple seas of sand; the first sharp silhouette of Jerusalem, like Mount St. Michael, lifting above that merely Moslem flood a crag still crowned with the towers of the Crusaders; ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... methodical neatness, and the junior clerks' by utter and chaotic confusion. None of these bedrooms were carpeted; none of them boasted of a chair—the trunks and boxes of the persons to whom they belonged answering instead; and none of the beds were graced with curtains. Notwithstanding this emptiness, however, they had a somewhat furnished appearance, from the number of greatcoats, leather capotes, fur caps, worsted sashes, guns, rifles, shot-belts, snow-shoes, and powder-horns with which the walls were profusely decorated. The ceilings of the rooms, moreover, ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... not of vacancy, which bespeaks a mood of sadness, even when the patient is so retarded as to be mute and therefore incapable of describing his emotions. Running through all the stages of stupor, however, there is an emptiness, an indifference that is in striking contrast to the positive pain that is felt or expressed by the depressed patient. It may be objected, of course, that this apathy really represents the final stage in the emotional blocking of the depressed individual, but the development ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... the greater number of travels which now issue from the British press. It may safely be affirmed that our writers of travels, both male and female, have of late years arrived at a pitch of weakness, trifling, and emptiness, which is unparalleled in the previous history of literature in this or perhaps any other country. When we see two post octavos of travels newly done up by the binder, we are prepared for a series of useless remarks, weak attempts at ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... of this inner push, why might we not raise our heads, refuse to be dominated by it, and live the life of free men, following the happy breezes of our desires? That is precisely what many have done, men who have reached maturity enough of mind to see the emptiness of following an ingrained impulse simply because it exists, but not a full enough maturity to see beyond to the real ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... masterpiece may be readily admitted, but in this Letter, as elsewhere, the merits of Bolingbroke's style are those of the popular orator who conceals repetitions, contradictory statements, and emptiness of thought under a dazzling display of rhetoric. That he had splendid gifts and exhibited an extraordinary ingenuity of resource was acknowledged by friend and foe. At one time taking a distinguished part in European affairs, at another artfully ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... decay. The men, as a rule, occupy inferior posts in Government offices or in business houses. The girls are almost always pretty, ignorant of the world, kind and agreeable and generally bilingual; they prattle innocently both in French and English. The emptiness of their ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... impudent borrowings from Homer, Theocritus, Ennius and Lucretius; the plain theft, revealed to us by Macrobius, of the second song of the Aeneid, copied almost word for word from one of Pisander's poems; in fine, all the unutterable emptiness of this heap of verses. The thing he could not forgive, however, and which infuriated him most, was the workmanship of the hexameters, beating like empty tin cans and extending their syllabic quantities measured according to the unchanging rule of a pedantic and dull prosody. ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... if I have the giving her, I shall not bestow her on thee. Thy mirth, friend, savoureth of folly: Thou art a person of a light mind; thy drum is a type of thee, it soundeth because it is empty. Verily, it is not from thy fullness, but thy emptiness that thou hast spoken this day. Friend, friend, we have hired this coach in partnership with thee, to carry us to the great city; we cannot go any other way. This worthy mother must hear thee, if thou wilt needs utter thy follies; we cannot help it, ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... South would gladly liberate her slaves, if she saw any prospect of bettering the condition of the objects of her tender and solicitous benevolence. I trust, too, that this admission will go far to prove the emptiness of your declaration, that the abolitionists "have thrown back for half a century the prospect of any species of emancipation of the African race, gradual or immediate, in any of the states," and the emptiness of ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... seventy-five miles to Danville, on thirteen crackers. They travelled from there to Andersonville, six days by rail, on four crackers a day, and, as a consequence of the rations, came in due course of time to a general sense of emptiness, and an incorrigible tendency to think of roast beef, boiled chicken, fried oysters, and other like dainties; and many of the prisoners, after battling awhile with the emptiness and the mental tendency, fell down exhausted, and were stowed away in the wagons following on ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... have rent the air, and the beautiful earth will be dead for ever, borne on in the sweep of the race that will never end, borne along yet a few ages, till her sweet body turns to star-dust in the great emptiness ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... dwells yonder," he answered, and, taking each of us by the hand, he led us forward across the great emptiness of the apse to ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... a hand to his big head as she hurried back through the pallid gloom. She spoke to him, crying out with sobbing breath what she had not dared to reveal to Blake. For Wapi the long night had ceased to be a hell of ghastly emptiness, and to her voice and the touch of her hand he responded with a whine that was the whine of a white man's dog. They had traveled two-thirds of the distance to the ship when he stopped in his tracks and ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... when the cot is occupied by an Halictus in course of metamorphosis, becomes the height of absurdity when the Gnat has passed that way. Instinct does not hesitate in the face of this ineptitude: it seals up emptiness. I say, emptiness, because the crafty maggot hastens to decamp the instant that the victuals are consumed, as though it foresaw an insuperable obstacle for the coming Fly: it quits the cell before the ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... I had passed, and refusing to compose themselves to rest. With the dawn I was up and on deck. As I stepped upon the poop and looked around upon the quiet harbour where the ships rode at anchor, I became aware of a certain emptiness in the bay. I rubbed my eyes and looked again. The Spanish ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... Thus musing, for a little space he stood As holden to the spot; and evil, good, Life, death, and earth beneath and heaven above, Shrank up to less than shadows,—only Love, With harpings of an hundred harps unseen, Filled all the emptiness where these ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... the matter short, Jenny, I'll carry over the little bit of supper that I was going to eat. For dinner I have tasted none, and it may be my young pretty Mistress Marget will eat a morsel with me; for it is mere emptiness, Mistress Jenny, that often puts these fancies of illness into young folk's heads." So saying, she put the silver posset-cup with the ale into Jenny's hands and assuming her mantle with the alacrity of one determined to sacrifice inclination to duty, she hid the stewpan under its folds, and ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... were false, if the eyes of the sea forgot their secret, or if the accent of the steep woods became vulgar, if the fairy adventures that happen in my heart fell flat, if the good friends my eyes have never seen failed me,—then indeed should I know emptiness, and ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... no one followed. He penetrated alone into an empty house of silence, and all around him the emptiness moved and ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... meant by the symbol is just what is expressed by the verbal revelation which accompanied it, and that was this: 'I AM THAT I AM.' The fire that did not burn out is the emblem of the divine nature which does not tend to death because it lives, nor to exhaustion because it energises, nor to emptiness because it bestows, but after all times is the same; lives by its own energy and is independent. 'I am that I have become,'—that is what men have to say. 'I am that I once was not, and again once shall not be,' ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... year Lisa had without doubt lived through more than in all the preceding twenty-five. Suddenly she had realised the emptiness of her whole life. It rose before her, base and sordid—this life at home and among the rich set in St. Petersburg—this animal existence that never sounded the depths, but only touched the ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... more significant of St. Dominic than the refuted Paynim philosopher who (with a movement, by the way, as obvious as it is clever) tears out a leaf from his own book? And I have touched only on the value of these frescoes as allegories. Not to speak of the emptiness of the one and the confusion of the other, as compositions, there is not a figure in either which has tactile values,—that ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... eldest son, and by lingering tortures dragged him to the grave. And then her little daughter was taken from her. Maria watched at the couch of suffering and death with maternal anguish. The glowing heart of a mother throbbed within the bosom of Maria. The heartlessness and emptiness of all other pursuits had but given intensity to the fervor of a mother's love. Though but twenty-three years of age, she had drained every cup of pleasure to its dregs. And now she began to enter upon a path every year more ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... sociology and the dinner parties he gave would not permit. Father was not a sociologist. His marriage with my mother had been very happy, and in the researches of his own science, physics, he had been very happy. But when mother died, his own work could not fill the emptiness. At first, in a mild way, he had dabbled in philosophy; then, becoming interested, he had drifted on into economics and sociology. He had a strong sense of justice, and he soon became fired with a passion ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... of centuries he leans Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, The emptiness of ages in his face, And on his back the burden of the world. Who made him dead to rapture and despair, A thing that grieves not and that never hopes, Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox? Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw? Whose was the hand that slanted back ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... 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 ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... appeared to be summed up in his refusal to take his place in the life-sized family group (tres distingue et tres soigne, remarks a modern critic of the work) painted about this time. His mother expostulated with him on the matter:—she must needs feel, a little icily, the emptiness of hope, and something more than the due measure of cold in things for a woman of her age, in the presence of a son who desired but to fade out of the world like a breath—and she suggested filial duty. "Good mother," he answered, ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... luxuries and raw materials from halfway across the galaxy. Its landing grid reared skyward and tapped the planet's ionosphere for power with which to hoist ships to clear space and pluck down others from emptiness. There was commerce and manufacture and wealth and culture, and Walden modestly admitted that its standard of living was the highest in the Nurmi Cluster. Its citizens had no reason to worry about anything but a supply of tranquilizers to enable them to stand the ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... put back the canvas and stepped inside. She saw a folding camp-cot stripped of bedding, a dresser with half-open drawers that disclosed emptiness, a dusty book-rack standing on the floor. The little mirror on the tent-pole, hung too high for her own reflection, held a darkling picture of a pine-bough against a patch of stars. She sat on the edge ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... 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 ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... is a hungry longing in the soul, A craving sense of emptiness and pain, She may not satisfy nor yet control, For all the teeming world looks void and vain. No compensation in eternal spheres, She knows the loneliness ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... neighbourhood she disliked to find herself; of whose neighbourhood she exceedingly disliked to be reminded. The muttered oath, the more than muttered jest, the various laughs that tell so much of head or heart emptiness,—the shadowy but sure tokens of that in human nature which one would not realize and which one strives to forget;—Fleda shrank within herself and would gladly have stopped her ears; did sometimes ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... had put her awful question: "Have you made up your mind, Fanny, what you are going to do?" That was twelve years ago, but deep down in some secret cave of Fanny's being the ghastly echo of the words still reverberated through the emptiness ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... acknowledge many things, which I thought they knew: yea sometimes it seemed to me as if every one was pointing me out as the most guilty wretch upon earth. I had now so great a sense of the vanity and emptiness of all things here below, that I knew the whole world could not possibly make me happy, no, nor the whole system of creation. When I waked in the morning, the first thought would be, Oh, my wretched soul, what shall I do, where shall I go? And when I laid down, would say, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... of the emptiness of London, and of the tumult every where else. To-day many elections begin. The sums of money disbursed within this month would give any body a very faint idea of the poverty of this undone country! I think the expense and contest is greater now we are said to be all of a mind, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... of it? The hearts of women are like little pieces of furniture wherein things are secreted, full of drawers fitted into each other; one hurts himself, breaks his nails in opening them, and then finds within only some withered flower, a few grains of dust—or emptiness! And then perhaps he felt afraid of learning ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... instead of what should properly proceed—the study of the causal conditions of the crime. For the causal law does not say that everything which occurs, taken as a whole and in its elements, has one ground—that would be simply categorical emptiness. What is really required is an efficient and satisfying cause. And this is required not merely for the deed as a whole but for every single detail. When causes are found for all of these they must be brought together ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... fullness of his lonely heart, he told her all about his life, its emptiness, its deserts, its longings. Each sentence was a knife placed in her hands; and as she contemplated his honest face which could conceal nothing, his earnest eyes which could hide nothing, Madame was conscious of a vague distrust of herself. If only he had offered to fight, ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... verbal or analytic propositions, or truisms, as information (except, of course, in explaining terms to the uninstructed), shows that we are not thinking what we say; for else we must become aware of our own emptiness. Every step forward in knowledge is expressed in a real or synthetic proposition; and it is only by means of such propositions that information can be given (except as to the meaning of words) or that an argument or train of reasoning can ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... more emphatic than that of glades and pools. The contrast of what is with what might be probably accounts for this. To step, for instance, at the place under notice, from the hedge of the plantation into the adjoining pale thoroughfare, and pause amid its emptiness for a moment, was to exchange by the act of a single stride the simple absence of human companionship for an incubus ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... being but of one sort, as it is easier to stop Nature when she makes too much speed than to force her on when languishing and faint. Besides, what some say, that fullness is more to be avoided than emptiness, is not true; but, on the contrary, fullness then only hurts when it ends in a surfeit or disease; but emptiness, though it doth no other mischief, is of itself unnatural. And let this suffice as an answer to what you proposed. But you sparing men have forgot, ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... would satisfy her now. She wanted some explanation of this hard, real life,—the unhappy-looking father, seated at the dull breakfast-table; the childish, bewildered mother; the little sordid tasks that filled the hours, or the more oppressive emptiness of weary, joyless leisure; the need of some tender, demonstrative love; the cruel sense that Tom didn't mind what she thought or felt, and that they were no longer playfellows together; the privation of all pleasant things that had come to her more than to others,—she wanted ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... king, in ruling his domains, had only paid attention to the wishes of his noblemen and his bishops. But the new world of trade and commerce which grew out of the Crusades forced him to recognise the middle class or suffer from an ever-increasing emptiness of his exchequer. Their majesties (if they had followed their hidden wishes) would have as lief consulted their cows and their pigs as the good burghers of their cities. But they could not help themselves. They swallowed the bitter pill because it was gilded, but not without ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... featureless abyss. Immermann intensely disliked it. He was, as he said, a lover of men; the worship of nature drained and exhausted the sympathies, the wills and the spirits of men. The passages in which Klingsor himself, in his moments of despair, and Merlin expose the emptiness of this philosophy, are among the best philosophic statements of the play. They are, how ever, too exhaustive. But they are good philosophy, if they are bad drama and poetry. Klingsor ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... bone,—and of the body below the waist there was not anything: it melted off into thinnest trailing shadow. Where the eyes of the lover deluded saw youth and grace and beauty, there appeared to the eyes of the watcher horror only, and the emptiness of death. Simultaneously another woman's figure, and a weirder, rose up from within the chamber, and swiftly made toward the watcher, as if discerning his presence. Then, in uttermost terror, he fled to the dwelling of Hakuodo Yusai, and, knocking ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... who is growing disgusted with grandeur, after having recognised its emptiness, who is enthusiastically desiring to go and enjoy her House of Saint Joseph, and wishes to get rid of her superintendence ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... 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 are eating, the saliva flows ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... name appeared amongst those of other gentlemen who intended to take seats on the platform in Belfast. The Unionist papers welcomed the entry into public life of a peer of my well-known intellectual powers and widely recognized moderation. The Liberal papers said that the emptiness of Ulster's opposition to Home Rule might be gauged by the fact that it had welcomed the support of ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... stepped into the house. Standing in the little circle of dull yellow light, he saw beneath his feet windrows of dust and layers of newspapers that had rested beneath a carpet but lately removed, and beyond, dusk emptiness, and silence. He advanced, looking for a chandelier, but though he found two, the incandescent globes had been removed from them. Throwing a mass of the papers from the floor into the grate and lighting them, a bright glare brought out every corner of the room. ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... the house a group of men appeared, as though they had come up from the ground. They waded waist-deep in the grass, in a compact body, bearing an improvised stretcher in their midst. Instantly, in the emptiness of the landscape, a cry arose whose shrillness pierced the still air like a sharp arrow flying straight to the very heart of the land; and, as if by enchantment, streams of human beings—of naked human beings—with spears in their hands, with bows, with ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... they sat on a park bench in the pleasant afternoon air, filling their lives with emptiness. They had married, and brought children into the world; sacrificed for them, managed a household, been widowed. They represented magnificent achievement, those four old women, though they themselves did not know it. They had come up the long hill, reached its apex, and come down. Their journey ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... violence of contrast; the atmosphere is vague and neutral, the action passes among ill-defined sitting-rooms, and the most poignant scene in the story takes place upon a staircase which has never been described. Thus the reader of modern novels is inevitably struck, in A Simple Story, by a sense of emptiness and thinness, which may well blind him to high intrinsic merits. The spirit of the eighteenth century is certainly present in the book, but it is the eighteenth century of France rather than of England. Mrs. Inchbald no doubt owed much to Richardson; her view of life is the indoor ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... himself, "the delights of rustic conversation with a good meal at the end thereof than lordly solitude and emptiness withal." ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... land. The air was still. Carley labored at her task of rising, and brushing her hair, and pulling on her boots; and it appeared her former sufferings were as naught compared with the pangs of this morning. How she hated the cold, the bleak, denuded forest land, the emptiness, the roughness, the crudeness! If this sort of feeling grew any worse she thought she would hate Glenn. Yet she was nonetheless set upon going on, and seeing the sheep-dip, and riding that fiendish mustang ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... wildly on. Whether she had bowed or made any sign of recognition, she did not know. It did not matter, though; if he thought her cold or strange or anything, what difference could it possibly make? For her there would be left forever this dead emptiness. These casual meetings were inevitable; and she would come home after them worn-out and heavy-eyed. "A slight headache" was ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... shopkeepers of Monaghan have unpatriotic names. Crawford, Jenkins, Henry, Campbell, Kerr, McEntee, Macdonald, and their like must in some way be accountable for the smartness of the town and for the emptiness of the prison on the hill. And you soon see that the Cathedral was needed, for besides the Protestant church, the town is polluted by two Presbyterian churches, to say nothing of a schism-shop used by the Wesleyan Methodists. A Monaghan ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... must tell thee somewhat, lest haply thou blame me for not acquainting thee therewith. Know that the treasury is being exhausted; there is none but a little money left in it and in ten days more we shall shut it upon emptiness." Quoth the King, "O Wazir, verily my son-in-law's baggage-train tarrieth long and there appeareth no news thereof." The Minister laughed and said , Allah be gracious to thee, O King of the age! Thou art none other ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... the idea is originally, I believe, Platonic; certainly not Homeric. Egyptian possibly—but I have read nothing yet of the recent discoveries in Egypt. Not, however, quite liking to leave the matter in the complete emptiness of my own resources, I have appealed to my general investigator, Mr. Anderson (James R.), who ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... the sky showed, he might be able to look down. He scrambled up a barrier two man-heights high. There was a screen of straggly brush, with emptiness beyond. He peered. ...
— The Invaders • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... American, with its lofty possibilities for himself and his race, to the position of an Englishman of property and title; and she, for her part, shall choose the condition and prospects of woman in America, to the emptiness of the life of a woman of rank in England. So they shall depart, lofty and poor, out of the home which might be their own, if they would stoop to make it so. Possibly the daughter of Eldredge may be a girl not yet in her teens, for whom Alice has ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and revealed two bare rooms, the brilliantly burning gas showing frescoes of unusual beauty, but beyond these there was nothing to relieve their bleak emptiness. "I have no use for these rooms," he remarked briefly, closing the door. "Come with me," and he led her to the apartment facing the street on the second floor. The gas was burning dimly, but when he had placed ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... of marble. One side of any room intended for noonday retirement is generally laid open to a quadrangle, in the centre of which there dances the jet of a fountain. There is no furniture that can interfere with the cool, palace-like emptiness of the apartments. A divan (which is a low and doubly broad sofa) runs round the three walled sides of the room. A few Persian carpets (which ought to be called Persian rugs, for that is the word which indicates their shape and dimensions) are sometimes ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... determined to relinquish as having been too dearly bought, as he had the courage to recognize in the place that is the most eminent in Christendom, and as being, after all, quite incapable of satisfying his desires, so conscious was he of his mistake and of the emptiness of human greatness? But, so long as he was bent upon obtaining what he was one day to despise, he kept everything moving by means of powerful and secret springs, and, after that all parties were overthrown, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... 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 waved lightly in the breeze. In the golden glow of the footlights and against ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... dull, grey; there was a feeling of rain in the air. To my amazement, I found no one under the oak; I walked several times round it, went up to the edge of the wood, turned back again, peered anxiously into the darkness.... All was emptiness. I waited a little, then several times I uttered the name, Alice, each time a little louder,... but she did not appear. I felt sad, almost sick at heart; my previous apprehensions vanished; I could not resign myself ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... letters—a mode of composition in which Libanius was thought to excel—are still extant, and already published. The critics may praise their subtle and elegant brevity; yet Dr. Bentley (Dissertation upon Phalaris, p. 48) might justly, though quaintly observe, that "you feel, by the emptiness and deadness of them, that you converse with some dreaming pedant, with ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... our way home, we met a company of our former worldly associates. They accosted us in their customary worldly way. We replied somewhat under the influence of their worldly spirit. I felt the glory depart, and an emptiness instead. I went on my way hastily, asking God to smile upon me again. He taught me by this that he had chosen me out of the world and its witticisms, and that slang phrases were ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr |
