Quotes Tagged "emptiness"

Do you really want to hold onto empty things? We don’t have to give anything up. They just need transforming. A thousand years of happiness would be much better than another thousand years of tears, don’t you think?

The artist's job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.

[E]verything is always in relationship. In fact, you could almost say that everything is made of relationship, in a sense.

I have poured my heart out …. And now I am empty.

Most of our desires tend to reveal their pettiness a few months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, or even seconds, after they have been fulfilled.

The car was on the FDR drive now and, turning her head, she glanced out at the bleak brown buildings of the projects that stretched for blocks along the drive. Something inside her sank at the sight of all that sameness, and she suddenly felt defeated. She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. In the past year, she'd started experiencing these moments of desperate emptiness, as if nothing really mattered, nothing was ever going to change, there was nothing new; and she could see her life stretching before her--one endless long day after the next, in which every day was essentially the same. Meanwhile, time was marching on, and all that was happening to her was that she was getting older and smaller, and one day she would be no bigger than a dot, and then she would simply disappear. Poof! Like a small leaf burned up under a magnifying glass in the sun. These feelings were shocking to her, because she'd never experienced world-weariness before. She'd never had time. All her life, she'd been striving and striving to become this thing that was herself--the entity that was Nico O'Neilly. And then, one morning, time had caught up with her and she had woken up and realized that she was there. She had arrived at her destination, and she had everything she'd worked so hard for: a stunning career, a loving (well, sort of) husband, whom she respected, and a beautiful eleven-year-old daughter whom she adored. She should have been thrilled. But instead, she felt tired. Like all those things belonged to someone else.

Grief ... gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.

All her life, she believed that carrying so many things is what made her heart always heavier. But there came a day, when she finally realized that, what really makes it heavier is, not having anything there.

To feel that empty, again, again. I listen to my heart, wave upon wave, salty and red, continuing on and on, marking time.

Love comes and goes away. It is the empty heart which never leaves us.

So I’ve held on to Catholicism or Zen, as practices, as fantasy futures, as possible identities. But when I actually dare to lower myself down into this emptiness—no, that sounds entirely too dualistic and willful and “courageous”—but when this seeing suddenly happens and thought relaxes, Zen drops completely away, and something much deeper is contacted, some entirely other way of being.

The difference between a modern artist and a Buddhist monk is in the approach. The artist goes into the void empt and returns with a souvenir, if you will. The monk approaches the void with a traditional body of knowledge and arrives at emptiness. Our world, no less than that of the monks, is full of junk that gets in the way of spiritual practice. The artist plays with the junk, the monk orders it into nothingness.

Every time I stray away from the Lord's word, I find emptiness and darkness.

Illusion is needed to disguise the emptiness within.

The honors of this world, what are they but puff, and emptiness, and peril of falling?