Hollowness Quotes

“Hollowness: that I understand. I'm starting to believe that there isn't anything you can do to fix it. That's what I've taken from the therapy sessions: the holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mold yourself through the gaps”
― Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train

“If we only see things through the cold-eyed lens of factuality and don’t listen to the yearning and screaming of unexpressed feelings, life may remain bleak in a mire of clinical hollowness, sodden in apathy and indifference. ("Morning after")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“If we keep on beating about circumstantial futilities and remain plodding along in the hollowness of weasel words, we need not expect to discover genuine answers to fundamental questions challenging us. ("Wit of the staircase")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“How can those who incinerate with jealousy at the sight of someone else's external glitter not realize that not everything that shines is a diamond? Only the person wearing new shoes can truly experience the pain; for others, captivating is the allure of new shoes.”
― Sanu Sharma, एकादेशमा [Ekadeshma]

“He completely lacked any ardent interest that might have occupied his mind. His interior life was impoverished, had undergone a deterioration so severe that it was like the almost constant burden of some vague grief. And bound up with it all was an implacable sense of personal duty and the grim determination to present himself at his best, to conceal his frailties by any means possible, and to keep up appearances. It had all contributed to making his existence what it was: artificial, self-conscious, and forced—until every word, every gesture, the slightest deed in the presence of others had become a taxing and grueling part in a play.”
― Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family

“As I walked in the dark through the tunnels and tunnels of books, I could not help being overcome by a sense of sadness. I couldn't help thinking that if I, by pure chance. had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“After reading Burgum, [Patricia Highsmith] wrote in her cahier that, like Kafka, she felt she was a pessimist, unable to formulate a system in which an individual could believe in God, government or self. Again like Kafka, she looked into the great abyss which separated the spiritual and the material and saw the terrifying emptiness, the hollowness, at the heart of every man, a sense of alienation she felt compelled to explore in her fiction. As her next hero, she would take an architect, 'a young man whose authority is art and therefore himself,' who when he murders, 'feels no guilt or even fear when he thinks of legal retribution'. The more she read of Kafka the more she felt afraid as she came to realise, 'I am so similar to him.”
― Andrew Wilson, Patricia Highsmith, ζωή στο σκοτάδι

“Last night, I felt a depth of sadness that I haven't felt or allowed myself to feel in a while. I mourned for Mia, the loss of our friendship, and mostly for the loss of my history, the lost memory of who I once was.”
― Heather Dark, excerpt from The Designer Wife

“It’s okay to feel that hollowness within you.
And it’s okay to be in denial. They are all stages of grief.”
― Faraaz Kazi, More Than Just Friends

“...even terrible memories are better than weird gaps or the hollowness of your feelings not making sense.”
― Holly Black, The Wicked King

“But Asha was right. He should have felt victorious, elated even. And yet, despite his valiant efforts, he felt like a man who had finally opened the box of glory to find that it did not contain what was etched on the lid.”
― Gourav Mohanty, Sons of Darkness

“Don’t waste your life trying to fill up a hollow or a hollow be filled up because it not only makes your life shallow but your conscious hollow.”
― Amit Abraham

“Secular life, like an unfertilized egg, is ever-pregnant with a strange hollowness.”
― Michael Shindler

“I said to myself, why am I doing this? I thought, I am trying to escape from my own life by burying myself in someone else's. I am doing what I have always done, following a stranger in the hope of finding a way out of my own maze. The woman is nothing more than a symbol. It is ridiculous. I continued.”
― Alderman Naomi

“I said to myself, why am I doing this? I thought, I am trying to escape from my own life by burying myself in someone else's. I am doing what I have always done, following a stranger in the hope of finding a way out of my own maze. The woman is nothing more than a symbol. It is ridiculous. I continued.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Lessons

“It can feel heavy with longing, and heavy with longing, in my mind, is preferable to hollow, which one also feels. If I'm heavy with longing, at least I have some idea of what I want.”
― Robert Pinsky

“I found myself mostly gazing outside, to the interlocking spurs and the snow that capped it. I found myself gazing at the clouds that ever gently swayed above the mountains. I found myself falling in love with every flower that blossomed on my way home.”
― Tshetrim Tharchen, A Play of the Cosmos: Script of the Stars

“Inner hollowness can make us do anything.”
― DR. POISON KING