"Emptiness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... uncomplimentary conjectures that the world had hazarded in regard to me. Society opened its arms to me as a returning prodigal, and my revulsion of feeling was all the more spontaneous from the fact, that, if some of my former acquaintances were as frivolous as ever, they had learned to conceal their emptiness by an adaptability which made them agreeable companions. There was a keen satisfaction, too, in the consciousness which became mine, as I went from house to house during the following weeks, that I excelled the most of them in the power to make myself agreeable. The reading and ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... stumbled upon obstructions in my journey hither, and I have met with adventures, but of this crowning that was to follow them I knew nought. Wullahy, thrice have I been saluted King; I whom fate selecteth for the shaving of Shagpat, and till now it was a beguilement, all emptiness.' ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... household were away in the fields all day, the women were busy and out of our sight; there was no sound but the plaintive wailing of a spinning-wheel, forever moaning out from some distant room—the most lonesome sound in nature, a sound steeped and sodden with homesickness and the emptiness of life. The family went to bed about dark every night, and as we were not invited to intrude any new customs, we naturally followed theirs. Those nights were a hundred years long to youths accustomed to being up till twelve. We lay awake and miserable till that hour every time, and grew old and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... brightly, with a little leaping of sparks, but soon it died down; and there was a long silence, in the room, a breathless silence, which, to Anthony's disordered mind, was not like the silence of emptiness, but such silence as may be heard when unseen things are crowding quietly to a closed door, expecting it to be opened, and as it were ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Balzac's life at a psychological moment. From his youth, his longing was "to be famous and to be loved." Having found the emptiness of a life of fame alone, having apparently grown weary of the poor Duchesse d'Abrantes, about to cease his intimacy with Madame de Berny, having been rejected by Mademoiselle de Trumilly, and having suffered bitterly at the ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... polish Upon my manners or abolish My most distinct disinclination For calling on a rich relation! In her house—(bulwark built between The life man lives and visions seen)— The sunlight hiccups white as chalk, Grown drunk with emptiness of talk, And silence hisses like a snake— Invertebrate and rattling ache.... Then suddenly Eternity Drowns all the houses like a sea And down the street the Trump of Doom Blares madly—shakes the ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... must assure thee, that 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 ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... merely rhetorical speakers had been cut short by the chairman, Henslow, who ruled that scientific discussion alone was in order, the Bishop rose in response to calls from the audience, and "spoke for full half-an-hour with inimitable spirit, emptiness, and unfairness," wrote Hooker. ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... happiness,' Paul asked, 'to pay for a week's emptiness and longing with one minute of delirium? Is it a happy thing to be so set on one unattainable hope as to be able, dreaming or waking, to think of nothing else? A man is not to be made happy ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... immortal brow a crown of gold, beneath which, sapphire eyes, that saw and foresaw, glittered. To-day the place where the marvellous creation stood is vacant. With the gorgeous host Pallas has departed. But the torch she held still burns. From the emptiness of her virginal arms, that never were ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... first 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 ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... somewhat melancholy, as she missed the beautiful works of art that had been a kind of education to her eye and taste, and over which she had so often dreamt and speculated with Annette. However, there was something nobler in the very emptiness of their niches, and there was more appropriateness in the little picture of the Holy Child embracing His Cross, now that it hung as the solo ornament of the library, than when it was vis-a-vis to Venus blindfolding Cupid, and ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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
... to sweep from their course to renew their energy from straggling suns that seemed to be farther and farther apart. The first was a tiny blue sun that burned its way through the emptiness. The second was a huge nebula that pulsed and spouted flame and protean worlds into space—enveloped them again as it breathed, scared them, and cast them out once more. And Odin wondered if in such a furnace and such torment his ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... admitted me, or any other person, I flung open the door through which I had come, and ran down the passage leading towards the main part of the house. In through the second and wider one I went, opening a door here and there, but finding only darkness and emptiness beyond. ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... richness of their uniform, and the insolence of their manners. It was the day of boasts and pomps. All forms and emblems had their ancient force. All men partook of the vices and follies which were praised. In their levity and delusion, they did not see the real emptiness and hollowness of their institutions. A blinded generation never can see the signs of the times. Only a few contemplative men hid themselves in retired places, but were denounced as croakers or evil minded. Every body ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... alike. Each had three marble tables and twelve straight-backed chairs ranged against the walls, the only variety being that some were covered with red damask and some with green. Vast old-fashioned mirrors, set in magnificent frames built into the wall, reflected vistas of emptiness and acres of cold solitude. Nor were the rooms where the family met much better. There were more tables and more straight- backed chairs there than in the outer halls, but that was all. The drawing-room had a carpet, which for many ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... 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 ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... All his dainties only sate his palate, and grow irksome to his sight. He daily changes his opinion of what is pleasure; and, on the trial, finds none that he can call such; and then falls to sighing again, for the emptiness of all that he has enjoyed. So that, instead of being my delight, and the comfort of my old age, sleepless nights, and anxious days, are all the rewards of my past labours for him. But I have had many visions and dreams to admonish me, ...
— The Governess - The Little Female Academy • Sarah Fielding
... coquettish nature of the weather, we gave it up. Not a bird to be seen—we took our bottles, and throwing our heads back on our shoulders, tried to look through the bottoms of them—they in turn gave out a gurgling sound of complaining emptiness. We fell into a refreshing sleep; the hours passed away unheeded, until we were awakened by the rustling of the reeds bending in the breeze, whispering of the coveted blow. Heavy black clouds were gathering, and soon old Boreas came cracking out from ...
— Nick Baba's Last Drink and Other Sketches • George P. Goff
... some maidens: she will not come when she is called; but if you leave her alone, she will come of herself. Before the day was over he had sacrificed griefs enough upon the altar of Love. All at once the whole vacant region rushed in upon him with a ghostly sense of emptiness and desolation. He wandered about the dreary house like a phantom about a cenotaph. The flowers having nothing to say, because they had ceased to mean anything, looked ashamed of themselves. The sunshine was hastening to have done with it, and let the winter come as soon as he ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... not," she said to me, "because I smile at this thy puerile conceit, Since on the truth it trusts not yet its foot, But turns thee, as 'tis wont, on emptiness. True substances are these which thou beholdest, Here relegate for breaking of some vow. Therefore speak with them, listen and ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... silence before the dawn. Oppressive, too, was the sense of emptiness. Two men in this chamber; one small watcher beyond the door; otherwise emptiness, sensed through all the two hundred rooms of the deserted pile. Life died from the world. People forgot. Stillness, death, loneliness, and destitution. They had picked him to the ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... cannot blame you. If we girls are pretending to you that we have been waiting all our lives for just you, we dislike to have you discover that we have employed those years of waiting very satisfactorily to ourselves, so much so that a casual observer would not have suspected the emptiness of them. ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... round the scene of solitude and emptiness, I was inexpressibly affected, even by recollecting those whom, when alive, I had no reason to regard with affection. But the thought that so many youths of goodly presence, warm with life, health, ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the grandfather used to sit, offering his wrinkled hands to the kisses of chubby children. Poor moderns, always moving or remodeling! We who from transforming our cities, our houses, our customs and creeds, have no longer where to lay our heads, let us not add to the pathos and emptiness of our changeful existence by abandoning the life of the home. Let us light again the flame put out on our hearths, make sanctuaries for ourselves, warm nests where the children may grow into men, where love may find privacy, old age repose, prayer an altar, and ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... I am most unlucky, most unhappy. You never had look'd in on me before, And when you came and dipt your sovereign head Thro' these low doors, you ask'd to eat with me. I had but emptiness to set before you, No not a draught of milk, no not an egg, Nothing but my brave bird, my noble falcon, My comrade of the house, and of the field. She had to die for it—she died for you. Perhaps I thought with those of ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... 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 ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... long, hot climb out of the valley to a hill where she could see very far again, but still that vast emptiness reigned. Even the eagle had disappeared, and she fancied he must be resting like a great emblem of freedom on one of the points of the castle-like battlement against the sky. It seemed as if the end of the world had come, and she was the only one left ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... followed the usual custom he would answer in the same tongue. But between "Tha bean Lecknamban air falbh" and "The wife of Ladyfield is gone," there must be some careful choice. The Gaelic of it was closer on the feelings of the event; the words some way seemed to make plain the emptiness of the farmhouse. When he said them, the people would think all at once of the little brown wrinkled dame, no more to be bustling about the kitchen, of her wheel silent, of her foot no more upon the blue flagstones of the milk-house, of her voice no more in the chamber where ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... tide rose. Such a burning tide it was, he fancied he heard the blood hiss as it curled round the roots of his hair. He noted this as curious, and remembered that in hanging or drowning it was the trifles that stamped themselves upon the mind. Also, it appeared that he was hollow, with nothing but emptiness where should ...
— Geoffrey Strong • Laura E. Richards
... another wheezing, half-whispered, half-strangled laugh, "see and hear the emptiness thereof! Nothing has been in its belly since cockcrow. And until now have I hungered for a smoke. Twice did I think to come to thee to-day and ask thee for kaitalafu (credit) for five sticks of tobacco, but I said to my pipe, 'Nay, let us wait till ...
— Pakia - 1901 • Louis Becke
... forcing one entirely to quit the earth. I passed several hours with him, and he knew how to reach my heart, even while condemning my faults. He caused me to feel humiliated for my sins, without crushing me, or driving me to despair; he showed me the futility of all human things, the sadness and emptiness of all pleasures arising from vanity and self-love.... Indeed, during a few moments, I thought seriously of consecrating my life entirely to God, and of becoming a gray nun in the convent ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... key-note was struck 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 ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... shameful thing, the sacrilegious degradation of the highest and holiest thing on earth. It has come, this ethical Church, to reinforce the wholly forgotten teaching of the Hebrew prophets of the utter emptiness of all religion devoid of moral life, the vanity of sacrifices, oblations and rites, the hollowness of formularies, creeds and confessions, the indispensable necessity of an ethical basis for all religious belief and practice. "What more," asks Micah, "doth the Lord require of ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... hung it upon the bough of the weeping willow tree. His eyes were still upon it, he was still regarding it at long range, through the shack door, getting the foreshorten of it, getting the middle distance, getting the perspective, utterly unable to stop his ceaseless staring into the emptiness of it, stop wondering what ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... insistent that I felt I could not face the future at all, even with such poor fragments of courage as I had gathered about me after Father's death, hoping that they would, at least, suffice for my endurance, if not for my content. But now they fell away from me at sight of the emptiness of life. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... is your emptiness exposed. Because of your long length and the great sword you carry and the angle at which you cock your hat, people have gone in fear of you, have believed in you, have imagined you to be as terrible and as formidable as you insolently make yourself appear. But at the first touch of true spirit you ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... which he called "a tessellated pavement without cement." On the other hand, he victoriously refuted the attacks of the Grenvilles against Rockingham, in his "Observations on the Present State of the Nation," exhibiting the emptiness of his opponents' declamations on the declining wealth of the country, and proving that its resources ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... bangs of the iron slice flying about his ears that he tightened his grip to prove to himself he had it there safely in his hand. He was vaguely amazed at the plainness with which down there he could hear the gale raging. Its howls and shrieks seemed to take on, in the emptiness of the bunker, something of the human character, of human rage and pain—being not vast but infinitely poignant. And there were, with every roll, thumps, too—profound, ponderous thumps, as if a bulky object of five-ton weight or so had got play in the ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... realized this and had made Hatty her special charge and duty; but now there was a gap in her daily life, a sense of emptiness and desolation. There was no need now to hurry through her morning's task that she might sit with Hatty. When she went out, there was no Hatty to watch for her return and listen to all her descriptions of what she had seen. At night, when Bessie ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... tenant at 30s. an acre, so that I could take her along with me. I would, and sell the horses and set to and work in my shirt-sleeves. A man could stand that. Nobody wouldn't laugh at me then. But there's an emptiness now here that makes me sick all through, as though I hadn't got stomach left for anything." Then poor Larry put his hand upon his heart and hid his face upon the churchyard wall. The attorney made some attempt to say a kind word to him, and then, ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... when the winds give o'er; So calm are we when passions are no more. For then we know how vain it was to boast Of fleeting things, so certain to be lost. Clouds of affection from our younger eyes Conceal that emptiness which age descries. ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... The silence and emptiness of the building gave her confidence, and, standing on a safe low platform erected by Jude, which she was nevertheless timid at mounting, she began painting in the letters of the first Table while he set ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... the greatest efforts of poetry, painting, and 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 triumph of the real sympathy. I believe that this notion of our having a simple pain in the reality, yet a delight in the ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... The doctor lay high in pillows, looking oddly boyish in his white nightgown in spite of his gray hair. A fire flickered in the old-fashioned polished iron grate; outside the window twilight and the fog were mingling. The room had some unfamiliar quality of ordered emptiness already, as if life's highway must be cleared for the coming of the ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... gray, considering his unsprightly manner when first introduced, had he not already, in certain after colloquies, given proof, in some degree, of the fact, that, with certain natures, a soberly continent air at times, so far from arguing emptiness of stuff, is good proof it is there, and plenty of it, because unwasted, and may be used the more effectively, too, when opportunity offers. What now follows on the part of the man in gray will still further exemplify, ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... hailed. Next to him were a bourgeois couple whose mourning attire, red eyes and swollen faces bespoke plainly enough the bereavement they had just suffered. Silent, indifferent to everything and everybody, their hands spread out on their knees, they stared into the ghastly emptiness, vainly seeking consolation for their shattered dream, ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... definite knowledge of the need to be met, with only a strong desire and a mixed ideal, and almost without his own volition, he found himself now sitting at a desk in West Tenth Street, with two employees, and nothing to do. How out of this emptiness was he ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... City were now in evidence. Those of shorter range, and spreading rays, kept the entire country bathed in steady light for several miles around him, while the larger ones—a hundred of them possibly—roved constantly over the black emptiness beyond. ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... his hands and said, "O King of the age, I 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 but heedless with respect to this impostor, this liar. As ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... till the 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
... at that great enigma of the firmament, the moon, which when looked at through the glass appears like a shining ball of lava, with its transparent ridges, its deep craters, bright plains and dark shadows. It is a world of emptiness. Nothing is there except the souls of those who violently separated themselves from their body to get rid of its load. There they are at peace; they feel nothing, do nothing, know neither sorrow nor joy, gain nor loss; there is neither air nor water, winds nor storms, no flowers or living creatures, ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... shows a talent of a very high order. He is a craftsman of the utmost deftness. He gets his effects with almost perfect assurance. Moreover, there is a poet in him; he knows how to reach the emotions. But once his stories are stripped down to the bare carcass their emptiness becomes immediately apparent. The ideas in them are not the ideas of a reflective and perspicacious man, but simply the ideas of a mob-orator, a mouther of inanities, a bugler, a school-girl. Reduce any of them to a simple proposition, and that proposition, in so far as it is intelligible at all, ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... family of the ancient counts of Nevers, was educated by Peter the Hermit, archdeacon of Soissons, his uncle by the mother's side. He learned from his infancy to despise the folly and emptiness of the riches and grandeur of the world, to abhor its pleasures, and to tremble at its dangers. His only delight was in exercises of piety and in his studies, in which he employed his whole time with indefatigable application. He was ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... little murmured cry she released herself, and flitted away into the engulfing darkness. The echoes of her swift descent came whispering up the stairs; in the distance a door was shut. The emptiness of the unfinished house seemed symbolic of the future which ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... applicable, than to 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... impressed me with the idea that I too had something to do. Certainly I had. One always has. Somehow I could not remember. It was intolerable, and even alarming, this blank, this emptiness of the many hours before night came again, till suddenly, it dawned upon me I had to make some extracts in the British Museum for our "Cromwell." Our Cromwell. There was no Cromwell; he had lived, had worked ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... The avalanches kept me awake. Besides, I slipped and fell a hundred times at the corner of the path," he said, with a shiver. "A hundred times I felt emptiness ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... must know himself, and what a wretch he is, so he must know the world, and what an empty thing it is. Cain did see himself, but saw not the emptiness of this world; and therefore instead of going to God by Christ, he went to the world, and there did take up to his dying day. (Gen 4:16) The world is a great snare to the soul, even to the souls ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... gasped then, and every speaker throughout the great cruiser of the void blared out the warning as he forced his already evacuated lungs to absolute emptiness. "Vee-Two ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... before he starts on a long journey. Such, at least, was my fancy; and I was annoyed to find that Helga's cousin, Anton von Strofzin, had invited himself to share our meal and our farewell. He conversed with his usual airy emptiness on all the topics that were supplying Strelsau with gossip. There were rumors that the king was ill; that the queen was angry at being carried off to Zenda; that the archbishop meant to preach against low dresses; that the chancellor was to be dismissed; that his daughter was to be married; ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... directed. Those senators and representatives are largely irrelevant; they are not concerned with realities. Their dishonesties are comparatively insignificant. The scorn of the public should be turned upon the emptiness of political thought, upon the fact that those men seem without even a conception of the nation's needs. And while they maunder along they stifle the forces of life which are trying to break through. It was ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... see what a shadow I have pursued—how madly I have neglected eternal happiness for temporal preferment. You, my son, are full of earthly hope, dreaming of the Lady Margaret, of minstrels' praises, and knightly fame. Do not think me harsh, if I pray God that you may speedily know their emptiness. You can never rise as high in this mundane atmosphere as I am now; but your soul is as immortal as mine, and would sicken over less renown, ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... 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 made like ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... increasingly realised and brought others to realise the paramount importance of the personal work of the Holy Spirit. Lady Huntly could not now join in the pursuits of the world as she had formerly done. Her husband did not fully sympathise with the change in her views, but he saw enough of the sinful emptiness of mere gaiety to make him refrain from insisting upon her taking part in its pursuits. More than this, he gave every facility to her for carrying out her wishes, even when he could not understand the ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... in Upper Egypt have the winter nights these transparencies of absolute emptiness nor these sinister colourings. As the light gradually fails, the sky passes from copper to bronze, but remains always metallic. The zenith becomes brownish like a brazen shield, while the setting sun alone retains its yellow colour, growing slowly paler till it is almost ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... the pretext for this latter system of spoliation derived immediately from the former? Had revenge in this instance any other effect than to increase, instead of diminishing, the mass of malice and evil already existing in the world? The emptiness and folly of retaliation are apparent from every example which can be brought forward." Shelley writes much further on retaliation, which he denounces as "futile superstition." Simple violence repels every high and generous thinker. Hear one other, Mazzini: "What we have to do ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... 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, ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... in truth is this wherewith ingenious Memphis has supplied all the offices in the world. The plants of Nile arise, a wood without leaves or branches, a harvest of the waters, the fair tresses of the marshes, plants full of emptiness, spongy, thirsty, having all their strength in their outer rind, tall and light, the fairest fruit of ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... of centuries, he leans Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, The emptiness of ages in his face, And on his back ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... correct, was thoroughly unnatural and full of peril. Alice, a very good girl, obedient and tractable, was in danger of becoming a recalcitrant and sour old maid. Will, a healthy and normal young man, with no bad habits, was in danger of being driven to them by the emptiness and exasperation of his mind. The worst of it all was that both of the young people were, in accordance with a well-known law of nature, growing older with what seemed to them a frightful and unreasonable ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... Lord Henry found it extremely difficult to rise above the barest platitudes in their talk to each other, and Agatha was astonished at the emptiness of their conversation. It was partly owing to this fact that Lord Henry would occasionally start a subject, like a wave, rolling back over the heads of those behind him, so that the acute embarrassment that he and Cleopatra felt in each other's presence might be slightly ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... was useless. "There's nothing to say, nothing to say." That rang in her head, like a church bell. "Nothing to say, nothing to say." A sense of desolation and total loss oppressed her. She had no hope. The vacancy, the silence, the enormous dry emptiness about her seemed to shut out all her landmarks. Why didn't she think of Lancelot? She wondered why, but realised that Lancelot meant nothing out there. She saw herself turn about. She cried out, "James! James!" ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... his purse to a state of emptiness. His last guinea was gone, and two months were wanting to the end of the quarter. George had played and been cheated. He had ventured to apply to his mother for small sums, when his dress or some trifling indulgence required an advance; and always with success. But here were sixty ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... expelled something must be put in its place, but the temperance reformers have not been wise enough for substitution: they have only been skilful in expulsion. Country life, in its representative communities, suffers today from monotony and emptiness. ...
— The Evolution of the Country Community - A Study in Religious Sociology • Warren H. Wilson
... Roger paid him liberally and led Margarita into the draggled, dusty station; the new one was not then built. Seated beside her in a relatively dim corner he tried to formulate some plan, but the absurd emptiness of the situation baffled even his practical good sense. How could he take this girl to a town that neither he nor she knew the name of? How, on the other hand, could he fling such a projectile as Margarita into any ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... to incite a spirit of pilgrimage thither; but all is dead! That Cathedral no longer has a soul; it is an inert corpse of stone; try attending Mass there, try to approach the Holy Table—you will feel an icy cloak fall on you and crush you. Is it the result of its emptiness, of its torpid services, of the froth of runs and trills they send up there, of its being closed in a hurry in the evening and never open till so late in the morning, long after daybreak? Or has it something to do with the permitted rush ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... never seemed so silent, so empty, so purposeless. The rows of closed doors opening from the gallery seemed like the portals of some huge mausoleum, vacant and chill. A house of desolation that cried to him to fill its emptiness with life and love. With lagging steps he walked half way along the gallery, passing two of the closed doors with averted head, but at the third he stopped abruptly, yielding to an impulse that had come to him. For a moment he hesitated, as though ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... felt deeply the emptiness and futility of much of the religious talk. He was interested only in those emotions and professions which could get themselves translated into character and action. Words have always been the bane of religion as well as its vehicle. Religious ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... emptiness of the opposing half such a picture, when completely in balance, will have some bit of detail or accent which the eye in its circular, symmetrical inspection will catch, unconsciously, and weave into its calculation of balance; or if not an object or accent or line of attraction, ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... but showed nothing other than cactus and baked alkali. The corral came next, and there too was emptiness. For an hour the search was unavailing, but at the end of that time Mr. Cassidy began to notice signs of nervousness on the part of his guest, which grew less as they proceeded. Then Mr. Cassidy retraced their steps to the place where the nervousness first ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... midst the fire-floods and poisonous clouds —The Captain's call to the steersman to turn the ship to an unnamed shore, For that time is over—the stagnant time in the port— Where the same old merchandise is bought and sold in an endless round, Where dead things drift in the exhaustion and emptiness ...
— Fruit-Gathering • Rabindranath Tagore
... find no way so obvious of showing his gratitude for her patronage, as composing an elaborate treatise on the Superiority of the Female Sex, which he dedicated to her. Shortly after, he produced a work not less remarkable, to demonstrate the Vanity and Emptiness of Scientifical Acquirements. Margaret of Austria being dead, he was subsequently appointed physician to Louisa of Savoy, mother to Francis I. This lady however having assigned him a task disagreeable to his inclination, a calculation according to the rules of astrology, he made no ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... 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 called ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... Wood the tide of human life flows at no time very fast, and in the first days of September Lyon found unmitigated emptiness in the straight sunny roads where the little plastered garden-walls, with their incommunicative doors, looked slightly Oriental. There was definite stillness in his own house, to which he admitted himself by his pass-key, ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... the lower heaven, are far from being found in the study of nature on the surface of the earth. Here I saw many things that we can entertain little or no notion of, in a state of common life, and the emptiness of our notion, that the planets are habitable worlds; that is, created like ours, for the subsistence and existence of man and beast, and the preservation of the vegitative and sensitive life: No, no, this is, I assure you, a world of spirits; for here I saw a clear demonstration of Satan being ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... arm-chair, speaking amidst his dreams, without waiting to hear the particular name of the young clerk who was wanted. And yet, when he got to the theatre, it was so full that he could hardly find a seat on which to sit. In all the world around us there is nothing more singular than the emptiness and ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... as deep as the North Star," said Sam, taking up the cup and finishing the little that remained. "Well, really, now I think we must be moving," said Humphrey, observing the emptiness of the vessel. ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... the position of Francis Bacon in 1605, when he published this work, where in his First Book he pointed out the discredits of learning from human defects of the learned, and emptiness of many of the studies chosen, or the way of dealing with them. This came, he said, especially by the mistaking or misplacing of the last or furthest end of knowledge, as if there were sought in it "a couch whereupon to rest a searching and restless spirit; ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... in his private office. It opened from another larger room that had once been tenanted but was now empty. The emptiness of the great chamber, with its small bed and simple furnishings, both attracted and repelled him, as was witnessed by the fact that he frequently rose and closed the door, only to rise again directly ...
— Dorothy's House Party • Evelyn Raymond
... felt better; also I saw that there was a personal impatience in my case that was not worthy of one who undertook to awaken the young. I introduced The Valley-Road Girl to Addison's "Sir Roger." There is an emptiness to me about Addison which I am not sure but partakes of a bit of prejudice, since I am primarily imbued with the principle that a writer must be a man before he is fit to be read. If I could read Addison now for the first time, I should know. The ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... that all that is otherwise in connection with Hinduism has to be eliminated from the field in which she could gather poetic thought. What, then, is the result? While there is a distinct charm in the rhythm of her verses, their utter emptiness makes them of no real value. The only poem, curiously enough, in which a deeper note is struck is when she describes the four kinds of religion which flourish under the kindly rule of H.H. the Nizam of Hyderabad: ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... seemed deep enough to hold all the gods. The round of the ether 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 ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... will only bring him.' And now her eyes were wet; it seemed as though he had given her new life. She sat erect; she was no longer like a marble image of despair. 'If I can only see him, if he will let me speak to him! but it is this emptiness—this blank, this dreadful displeasure—that is shutting me out from him, that ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... which becomes empty through the parting of lovers, still has music left in the heart of its emptiness. But the house that is empty because hearts are asunder, is awful in its silence. Even the cry of pain is out of ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... stationary for a whole year, and I have never observed other forms among their organs than those which we find in the secondary larva. The nervous system has undergone no change. The digestive apparatus is absolutely void and, because of its emptiness, appears only as a thin cord, sunk, lost amid the adipose sacs. The stercoral intestine has more substance; its outlines are better defined. The four gall-bladders are always perfectly distinct. The adipose tissue is more abundant than ever: it forms by itself ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... wardrobe had been flung open by the inspector, and the dresses and other articles of feminine apparel it contained flung out on the floor. There was no other hiding-place possible, except beneath the bed, and the ruthless hand of the inspector had torn off the white muslin bed hangings, revealing emptiness underneath. Rolfe went out into the hall again, and entered the room next the bedroom. This apartment was apparently used as a dining-room, for it contained a large table, a few chairs, a small sideboard, a spirit-stand, a case of books and ornaments, ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... robbers concealed along the river-bed, but we can see none of them. The valley is heat and emptiness. Even the jackal that slinks across the trail in front of us, droops and drags his tail in visible exhaustion. His lolling, red tongue is a signal of distress. In a climate like this one expects nothing from man or beast. Life degenerates, shrivels, stifles; and in the glaring open spaces ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... a hollow sense of desolation. It was not the want of butter nor the diminished meat; it was the total removal from life of that intangible splendour of hope produced by the lottery ticket. Ah! every day was drawn blank now. This gloom, this gnawing emptiness at the heart, was worse than either had foreseen or now confessed. Malicious Fate, too, they felt, would even crown with the grand prix the number they would have chosen. But for the prospective draw for the Wig—which reintroduced ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... tracks of small animals. The place was odorous, like all dense thickets, but it was not dry. Water ran through there somewhere. Jean drew easier breath. All sounds except the rustling of birds or mice in the willows had ceased. The brake was pervaded by a dreamy emptiness. Jean decided to steal on a little farther, then wait till he felt he might safely dare ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... carriage drive. Hyde Park Corner, with its rattle and hoot of traffic, lay immediately to his right. It was some thirty minutes past six on an early March evening, and dusk had fallen heavily over the scene, dusk mitigated by some faint moonlight and many street lamps. There was a wide emptiness over road and sidewalk, and yet there were many unconsidered figures moving silently through the half- light, or dotted unobtrusively on bench and chair, scarcely to be distinguished from the shadowed ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... chance she had been sullied by contact with those men whose thoughts are bent on winning a few sous nightly at cards after a good dinner; pride saved her from the shabby love intrigues of the provinces. A woman so much above the level of those about her, forced to decide between the emptiness of the men whom she meets and the emptiness of her own life, can make but one choice; marriage and society became a cloister for Anais. She lived by poetry as the Carmelite lives by religion. All the famous foreign books published in France for the first ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... she thought, her lip quivering as a wave of loneliness swept over her and left her with a feeling of emptiness. "If I were a man, he wouldn't dare to act as he does. But because I'm a girl, I can almost see him hoping that something ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... round and saw me. His face was pale and gloomy. His eyes burned, and yet there were tears in them, and on his cheeks. He did not speak, but the chilliness, the bareness, the emptiness of the room spoke for ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... with the Val d'Arno, a small territory belonging to that city, could, in a few hours, by the sound of a bell, bring together 135,000 well-armed men; whereas now that city, with all the others in that province, are brought to such despicable weakness, emptiness, poverty, and baseness, that they can neither resist the oppressions of their own prince, nor defend him or themselves if they were assaulted by a foreign enemy. The people are dispersed or destroyed, and the best families ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... well that all our treasures should be in one place. It is better that they should all be in One Person. And if only we will lay our poor emptiness by the side of His fulness there will pass over from that infinite abundance and sufficiency ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... the examiners. Nor was he one to feel the despairing eagerness of the young man who sees death approaching and so takes double mouthfuls and devours the arts and sciences which he will never have a chance to test and verify in life. That perpetual feeling of emptiness at the end, emptiness that is underneath and everywhere hidden beneath the cruel and absurd illusion of the world—this it was that swept aside all his enthusiasms. He would throw himself on a book, on a thought—then he stopped, discouraged. Whither would that ...
— Pierre and Luce • Romain Rolland
... originality of presentation. The treatment of official personages is startlingly new. All ceremony toward them gives place to a fearful familiarity, as of one who not only sees through and through them, but oversees. Grave Emptiness and strutting Vanity, found in high places, are mocked with immortal mimicry. Indeed, those of the "wind-bag" species generally, wherever they appear in important affairs, are so admirably exposed, that we see how they inevitably lead States to disaster and leave them ruins, while their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... 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 of the cot and picked up a discarded ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... situated child, surrounded by many comforts of which the majority of well-born children are deprived, and deprived of many comforts by which lowly-born children are surrounded. I was happiest when I was too young to distinguish between pleasure and pain, and, as it were to provide for the emptiness of much of my after life, destiny willed that my memory should be the strongest and most comforting faculty ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... I had become partly reconciled to the awful mystery of life, to the uselessness of effort; when the emptiness of everything appeared to me in a new ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... gloves, stretched them, put her things away; she gazed at the two principal rooms, at the soiled numbers of La Vie Parisienne and the cracked bric-a-brac in the drawing-room, at the rent in the lace bedcover, and the foul mess of toilet apparatus in the bedroom. The forlorn emptiness of the place appalled her. She had been quite fairly successful in her London career. Hundreds of men had caressed her and paid her with compliments and sweets and money. She had been really admired. The flat had had gay hours. Unmistakable aristocrats ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... incredulity, that we felt almost disposed to allow the frequent insinuations of our concealed political character to remain uncontradicted—so useless were all our endeavours to satisfy the natives as to our real position. In vain I urged upon the Meer the emptiness of all his professions of friendship if he now declined to assist me in the manner I clearly pointed out; all was of no avail; on the contrary, the more urgent I became the more obstinate he grew, and I at last was painfully ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... 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 ours now-a-days are ...
— Pillars of Society • Henrik Ibsen
... to feel extremely weak, with a continuous feeling of emptiness in our insides. Personally, I felt no actual pain. The mental strain, perhaps, was the most trying thing for me, for I had no idea when we might find food. I was beginning to feel more than ever the responsibility of taking those poor fellows ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... pass along to noontime. Ere noontime came I was consumed with gnawing pains of emptiness. As nearly as I might judge, I contained naught save vast hollow spaces and acoustics and vacuums and empty, echoing, neglected convolutions. Sorely was I tempted to relax the rigors of the just-inaugurated regime; nobly, ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... of the most lordly kind. He possessed, and highly prized, certain cartoons attributed to Julio Romano, having refused a liberal offer for them from Russia, because, as he explained, 'he would not sell works of elegance to barbarians.' Impressed with the size and emptiness of the Louvre Gallery, however, he now offered his cartoons to the French King as a gift. They were accepted, and four splendid specimens of Gobelin tapestry were bestowed upon the painter in token of royal recognition and gratitude. ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... 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 ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... 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 too ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... service of other things. Sister Ursula's voice was very sweet, but the matter of her speech did not interest. The invalid lay still, looking out of the window upon the street all dressed in its Sunday afternoon emptiness. Then he shut his eyes. The doctor's boy rang at the door. Sister Ursula stepped out into the hall, not to disturb the sleeper, and took the medicine from the boy's hand. Then the lift shot down again, and even ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... close of the last century, a gospel of esthetics was preached. Its apostles were chiefly Germans, and among them Schiller and Goethe are not inconspicuous names. The latter, before his long life was closed, began to see the emptiness of such teachings, and the violence perpetrated on the mind by forcing on the religious sentiment the food fit only for ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... and the modern novel communicates to them an intellectual irritation which might almost stand for a mental process. If they have not ideas, they have notions of things, and however inexact and absurd these may be, they are better than emptiness. ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... Scythian Songs is without introduction. Whether the waste, darkness, earthquake and emptiness described are imminent or have happened is still left uncertain, as in the previous songs. The Prophet speaks, but as before the Voice of God ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... His thought trembles before the curve of a neck. Graceful images unravel in his mind at the sight of a woman's breasts. To himself he declaims, 'I am in love with her. She is beautiful. I will take her beauty in my arms. There is an emptiness in me that clamors for the charm and ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... other name for it? You could no longer bear the emptiness of your house. You were on the look-out for ...
— The Lady From The Sea • Henrik Ibsen
... as the light; to us reveal Our emptiness and woe; And lead us in those paths of life ...
— The Otterbein Hymnal - For Use in Public and Social Worship • Edmund S. Lorenz
... hesitation all on mine. I looked into the pale, quiet, resigned young face—I saw the pure, innocent heart, in the loving eyes that looked back at me—and the poor worldly cautions and objections that rose to my lips dwindled and died away in their own emptiness. I hung my head in silence. In her place the despicably small pride which makes so many women deceitful would have been my pride, and would have made ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... the verdant solitude of the Tuolumne hills, that dreamy, delicious paradise where once a vast population had gathered when placer-mining had been in its bloom, a dozen years before. The human swarm had scattered when the washings failed to pay, leaving only a quiet emptiness and the few pocket-miners along the Stanislaus and among the hills. Vast areas of that section present a strange appearance to-day. Long stretches there are, crowded and jammed and drifted with ghostly white stones that stand up like fossils of a prehistoric life—the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... whole of 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 fully awake to my own misery I might very well have gone crazy there in the darkness; ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... that moment the house seemed their own, its people their people; they were just two more members of a big family, whose duty it was to look after the interests of their brothers and sisters while they were away; and when evidences of poverty and emptiness met them on every side, the two pairs of eyes met with a mutual impulse, so strong that it needed not ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... real, terrible things of life? What had he had in his whole life, save kindness and a sheltered home, and then study, and a little divinity, and a little science? He sat and gazed at the image of himself in his mind's glass, and found it a gibbering phantom, with emptiness where should be eyes, and dry dust ...
— "Some Say" - Neighbours in Cyrus • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... Napoleon could do nothing better at the Champ de Mai, than what he did: namely, to endeavour to conceal the emptiness of the day under the pomp of a religious and military solemnity, calculated to move the heart, and strengthen by fresh bands the union, already subsisting between him, the people, and ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. II • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... her breath with a little sob. Before her stood the slender figure in the yellow-white gown—John's gown. Into her eyes looked those other eyes, dark and wistful,—like John's eyes. And her arms ached with emptiness. ...
— Just David • Eleanor H. Porter
... and all is vanity! Let us raise the veil of deception that shrouds the emptiness of human joy. Alvira has now gratified her heart's desires in everything she could have under the sun. She had beauty, wealth, and fame, but she was like the pretty moth that hovers around the flame of the candle, and finds its ruin in the ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... charm of her grace and beauty had influenced even him, and failed utterly to estimate their effect upon others. He said to himself that Mr. Percy was a mere selfish fop, who, tired of the amusements of Europe and too effeminate for the hardier enjoyments of a new country, was driven by mere emptiness of head to occupy himself with the pursuit of the prettiest woman he ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... out and he hurried to get off. She waved to him from the window. She was tired, so she went to bed at once, with never a dream of the emptiness her small presence left in ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... or Dickens's sympathetic 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 ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... that came to her through the open door. There was time yet, but she was not impatient any more; the opera had begun and she was a part of it already, before she had set her foot upon the stage, before she had seen, for the first time, the full house before her, instead of the yawning emptiness. It would be dark when she went on, for Gilda's first entrance is in the night scene in the courtyard, but it would not be empty, and perhaps it would not be silent either. It was quite likely that a little encouraging applause for the ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... the wall at the side of the narrow lounge, to the emptiness where her pillow should be. "Good-night, Mother," he muttered huskily. Mother did not answer for the first time in nights beyond the counting. Mother would not be there to answer for at least six nights to come. A week, thought this old man, as the other old man had reflected a few hours ...
— Old Lady Number 31 • Louise Forsslund
... whom he could not surpass in speed, he pressed on till the foot of the mountain stopped his course." 9. What is the third method of analysis? 10. How is the following example analyzed by this method? "Such is the emptiness of human enjoyment, that we are always impatient of the present. Attainment is followed by neglect, and possession, by disgust. Few moments are more pleasing than those in which the mind is concerting measures for a new undertaking. From the first hint that wakens the fancy, to the hour of ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... here and 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, of ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... intolerable sense of loss and folly, this smarting emptiness, this rage with herself and her life? She only knew that whereas the touch, the eye of Aldous Raeburn had neither compelled nor thrilled her, so long as she possessed his whole heart and life—now—that she had no right ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... accomplished. It is only a big word, printed with a capital letter, to express the objective side of the relativity of human, knowledge. It connotes all that we do not know. It is a mere confession of ignorance; it is hollowness, emptiness, a vacuum, a nothing. And this nothing, which Mr. Spencer adorns with endless quasi-scientific rhetoric, is used as a buttress ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... obituary notice." His ideal is the individual who lives and acts in the full light of that "self-behind-the-frontage"—the "hinterland," as he calls him; and his literary method in this book is to expose the emptiness of the shop-window, to cast his satire upon the ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... unbroken prairie country, into the smiling, sun-kissed silence and emptiness, two people were driving: a white girl of two-and-twenty summers and an Indian man a few years older. Back of them, in the direction from which they had come, was the outline of a straggling, desolate village. Ahead, to either side, ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... precipitous banks of roaring torrents, in monstrous caverns, or steering a tossing boat in the little circle of the horizon amidst the tumbled, incessant sea, all in their several ways communing with the emptiness, the enigmatic spaces and silences, the winds and torrents and soulless forces that lie about the lit and ordered life ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... 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 ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... an Irishman; somewhat idle and intemperate; who lived nobody knew how nor where, sponging wherever he had a chance, and often of course upon Goldsmith, who was ever the vagabond's friend, or rather victim. Hiffernan was something of a physician, and elevated the emptiness of his purse into the dignity of a disease, which he termed impecuniosity, and against which he claimed a right to call for relief from the healthier purses of his friends. He was a scribbler for the newspapers, and latterly ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... and yet listening, till all possible chance was over of catching any longer the sound of his steps. No more tears; only a great aching emptiness. The unhoped-for chance had been hers, and she had lost it knowingly. What else ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... no word for me? I am thy thought. God, let thy mighty heart beat into mine, And let mine answer as a pulse to thine. See, I am low; yea, very low; but thou Art high, and thou canst lift me up to thee. I am a child, a fool before thee, God; But thou hast made my weakness as my strength. I am an emptiness for thee to fill; My soul, a cavern for thy sea. I lie Diffused, abandoning myself to thee.... —I will look up, if life should fail in looking. Ah me! A stream cut from my parent-spring! Ah me! A life lost from ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... air. So we walked among the trees to the door of the church. A smiling elder, in an unaccustomed long coat, bowed and greeted us. As we went in there was an odour of cushions and our footsteps on the wooden floor echoed in the warm emptiness of the church. The Scotch preacher was finding his place in the big Bible; he stood solid and shaggy behind the yellow oak pulpit, a peculiar professional look on his face. In the pulpit the Scotch preacher is too much minister, too little man. He is ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... being torn off and a light set free. Amazement, doubting, incredulous came first, and with that eagerness, trembling and afraid. And then hope—and then the fear to hope. And hunger. He bent forward, his eyes peered into the quiet emptiness, his fingers gripped the cloth as if to anchor him to a wonder, to an unbelievable something; his body leaned—to something—and his face now was the face of a starved man, of a man dying from thirst, who sees ...
— The Lifted Bandage • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... of finding that he could not tear it out of his heart. He was a silent person, and a rather neglected person, and unbusinesslike, and unsuccessful, and uncultured, and unsociable, and unbeautiful. So there was nothing worse than emptiness where his secret story used to be. He had not found it worth while to fill the space. He had not found it worth ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... to the hay-yard. Dave had disappeared. Half an hour of search failed to bring him to light. On the point of entering a restaurant to allay his sense of emptiness, Van was suddenly accosted by a wild-eyed man, bare-headed and sweating, who ran at ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... she, 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 with the smoke! else I snatch the pipe from thy mouth and hurl thee where that ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... methods known to a seasoned vaquero for driving them back, his progress had been slow. But he finally came out into the road again and was plodding along the stone wall within half a mile of the house, his face very disconsolate because of his protesting feet and the emptiness in his stomach, when Manuel himself confronted him suddenly coming ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... filling his subject with generalities, and yet never intruding commonplaces. No publicist who deals as largely in general propositions has ever been as free from truisms; no one has ever treated great themes with so much elevation, and yet been so wholly secured against the pitfalls of emptiness and the vague. And it is instructive to compare the foundation of all his pleas for the colonists with that on which they erected their own theoretic declaration of independence. The American leaders were impregnated with the metaphysical ideas of rights which ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... little proper thing! How I should have liked to have seen her. Did she open her purse and exhibit its emptiness to the company at large? Did she stand on a chair and lecture the frivolous people who assemble in that house on the emptiness of life? Oh, how I wish I could have looked ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... essence, the master force which directs, subdues and uses matter; and in prayer we have already seen that we place ourselves in communication with the Central Force of the universe, acquiring power we should not otherwise possess, and replenishing our emptiness from an inexhaustible store. But if thought, mind, will, are that which lies behind all physical accomplishment, from the simplest to the most wonderful; and if by an exercise of the same faculty we may actually secure results ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... blackens the brightest life. Cut off from all his many interests, 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 is ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre |
