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More "Emptiness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... view he takes of death, and the lofty scorn he displays towards his calumniators, are as a prophecy on his own destiny when received among immortal names, and the poisonous breath of critics has vanished into emptiness ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... the Country, and what did she find there? Just a lot of emptiness, with flowers everywhere. The birds were screaming overhead, the sun was on her face, The fences were untidy, ...
— England over Seas • Lloyd Roberts
... was in darkness, and the door was locked, but through the uncurtained glass of the window, she was able to irradiate the emptiness of its interior. Antony was ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... once only, but often, and she felt a pang of grateful jealousy. He got together the things that Mrs. Kenton had pretended to want, and after glancing in at the different rooms, which seemed to be lying stealthily in wait for him, with their emptiness and silence, he went down-stairs with the bundle he had made, and turned into his library. He had some thought of looking at the collections for his history, but, after pulling open one of the drawers in ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... her young friend at some distance from the other guests, in order that the Earl might have the power of saying some word; but the young barrister had taken this opportunity of making himself agreeable, and stood opposite to her talking nothings about the emptiness of London, and the glories of the season when it should come. Lady Anna did not hear a word that the young barrister said. Lady Anna's ear was straining itself to hear what Lord Lovel might say, and her eye, though not quite turned towards him, ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... triumphant exultations over Pope and Howe I have sometimes suppressed, and his contemptible ostentation I have frequently concealed; but I have in some places shown him, as he would have shown himself, for the reader's diversion, that the inflated emptiness of some notes may justify or excuse ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... water for fear of the sharks. The natives are such expert swimmers that they do not seem to think much of this danger. As the shark turns on his back to take a bite at them, they dive underneath him, and he snaps his jaws on emptiness. In fact, sometimes the swimmer will take advantage of the opportunity to stab his enemy as he passes ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... to achieve, yet from the depths of his soul came only emptiness. Vague, purposeless aspirations, like disembodied spirits, haunted him by night and by day. Before his inner vision came unfamiliar scenes, detached fragments of conversation, the atmosphere, the feeling of an old romance, then, by a swift change, darkness ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... at the categorical command of conscience, was afterwards laid open to all men in the "Metaphysic of Ethics?" As little will you allow your philosophical need to be satisfied with any thing you can get from SCHELLING; for however well it sounds to "throw yourself from the transcendental emptiness of ideal reason into the warm embrace of living and luxuriant nature," here also you will find yourself haunted by the intellectual phantom of absolute identity, (say absolute inanity,) or in its best ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... wretched ghost of my past self, doomed to return from the grave to look helplessly upon the loss and ruin of all the fair, once precious things of by-gone days. The splendid universe around me seemed no more upheld by the hand of God—no more a majestic marvel; it was to me but an inflated bubble of emptiness—a mere ball for devils to kick and spurn through space! Of what avail these twinkling stars—these stately leaf-laden trees—these cups of fragrance we know as flowers—this round wonder of the eyes called Nature? of what avail ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... last two being very eloquent at times, though immature. Rolla (1833) is one of the strongest and most depressing of his works; the sceptic regrets the faith he has lost the power to regain, and realizes in lurid flashes the desolate emptiness of his own heart. At this period the crisis of his life was reached. He accompanied George Sand to Italy, a rupture between them occurred, and De Musset returned to ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... The emptiness of the Duomo is another of its charms. Nothing is allowed to impair the vista as you stand by the western entrance: the floor has no chairs; the great columns rise from it in the gloom as if they, too, were rooted. The walls, too, are ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... compassion the graying hair, the tired eyes of anxiety, the lines of brooding and despondency deepening in faces she remembered as carefree and hopeful, the look of resignation that comes to the weaklings who have lost their grip, the emptiness of burned-out passion, the weary languor of repeated failure—she saw it all through the eyes ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... so obviously held the whip-hand that even Paget's diplomacy could do little to qualify the completeness of the surrender. There was a brave display of preparation for a determined defence, but the negotiators on both sides were fully aware of its emptiness. There was nothing that Henry II. desired more than the termination of strife with his excellent neighbours, provided that they would hand over Boulogne, cancel most of the money claim under the treaty of 1546 for which they held it as security, and withdraw their ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... do? Ah! well-a-day! how little is the world's esteem worthy of care! Ambition climbs the dizzy steeps of fame; the young and inexperienced, whose admiration is not worth a straw, applaud; but the wise, for whose good-will Ambition toils, look on with indifference; for they know the emptiness of human greatness. But while we stop to moralize, the reader grows a-weary; and even thou, DEIDRICH, who art so constitutionally polite, compressest thy labial muscles, and thumpest nervously the floor with thy ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... the palm of my hand. The lines in the tips of my fingers could not be duplicated in a million years. Shall any man ask me to prove there are miracles or to put my finger on God? or to go out into some great breath of emptiness or argument to be sure there is a God? I am infinite. Therefore there is a God. I feel daily the God within me. Has He not kindled the fire in my bones and out of the burning dust warmed me before the stars—made a hearth for my soul before them? I ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... the two parties there was not one who, upon returning home, did not bitterly realize the emptiness of his life and ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... 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
... cat-like, along the rock-foot, and hit, at length, the track up which a while before had fled Killer and victim. Up that ragged way he crawled on hands and knees. The perspiration rolled off his face; one elbow brushed the rock perpetually; one hand plunged ever and anon into that naked emptiness on the other side. ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... it was,—a letter in James's handsome, dashing hand; and the little puss, before she knew what she was about, actually kissed it, with a fervor which would much have astonished the writer, could he at that moment have been clairvoyant. But Mary felt as one who finds, in the emptiness after a friend's death, an unexpected message or memento; and all alone in the white, calm stillness of her little room her heart took sudden possession of her. She opened the letter with trembling hands, and read what of course we shall let you read. We got it ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... law; my love the answering love; my hope its object; my fears their dissipation; my sins their forgiveness; my weaknesses their strength; and, to all that I am, what He is answers, as fulness to emptiness, and as supply to need. So, 'believing towards Him, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... impart any life to the dreary apartment. Scattered throughout the white pews, in dull, shapeless, neutral blotches, rigidly separated from each other, they seemed only to accent the colorless church and the emptiness of all things. A few children, who had huddled together for warmth in one of the back benches and who had became glutinous and adherent through moisture, were laboriously drawn out and painfully picked apart by a ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... sense of shame—the outcome, no doubt, of his own disgust at the unsavory accessories of his love—had withheld him from making these confidences. He made none now, complained only in a general way of the emptiness of his life, to which neither desire nor hope bound him any more; especially that he had no future, and looked forward to each new day with ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... clothes, made a bundle of his suit and stockings and shoes and left them in the rubbing-room where Danny could not fail to find them and then hurried out of the building and through the deserted yard to Billings and the sunlit silence and emptiness of his room. ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... was rent with the knowledge that he lay stark and cold in that very library where so much of his life had been lived. Marie gathered her into her arms and held her tight. She stared aghast at a world which frightened her by its emptiness. At her side stood Ben, his lips twitching, and in his eyes that haunting fear which always foreran the father's struggles. A month later the boy did not come home one night, but came after three ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... place. The old order had passed away, and no new order had, as yet, effectively disclosed itself. He had not formulated all this, or even consciously recognised the modification of his own attitude. Nevertheless he felt the gnawing ache of inward emptiness. It effectually broke up the torpor which had held him. It made him very restless. It reawoke in him an inclination ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... but on a somewhat lower religious level are the frequent protests against the preacher's pessimistic assertions of the emptiness of life and the vanity of effort. For the injunction to eat and drink and enjoy the fruits of one's labour may, in their contexts, also be fairly considered not simply as statements, but as protests (cf. v. 18-20 with v. 13-17); for ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... Near by, in a chair tipped against the wall, sat the watchman, corncob pipe in hand, head drooping, eyes closed, mouth ajar. A snore of the first magnitude seemed to vibrate the very walls. On the floor beside the chair stood a two-quart tin pail full of arid emptiness. ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... souvenir of his visit to the Court, a beautiful gold watch, ornamented with diamonds. Notwithstanding the pleasure of this visit, Jasmin, as with a prophetic eye, saw the marks of sorrow upon the countenance of the King, who was already experiencing the emptiness of human glory. Scarcely had Jasmin left the palace when he wrote to his friend Madame de Virens, at Agen: "On that noble face I could see, beneath the smile, the expression of sadness; so that from to-day I can no longer say: ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... tongue tip to tell her that she was gloriously different from most girls he had known, but discretion sealed his lips. Instead, he told her of life in the city and what it means to society women, its emptiness and unsatisfaction. ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... from the first answer to the question: "What is to be done?" consisted for me in this, that it was necessary for me to repent, in the full sense of that word,—i.e., to entirely alter my conception of my position and my activity; to confess the hurtfulness and emptiness of my activity, instead of its utility and gravity; to confess my own ignorance instead of culture; to confess my immorality and harshness in the place of my kindness and morality; instead of my elevation, to acknowledge my lowliness. I say, that in addition to not lying to myself, I had to repent, ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... over the emptiness of his great triumph. His son the Black Prince had died, cursing the falsity of Frenchmen. England also had gone through the great tragedy of the Black Death and her people, like those of France, had been driven to the point of rebellion—though with them this meant ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the contingencies of war and stood intact, but tenantless. I made haste to escape from the old house, and was sorry that I had ventured there before the appointed time. The sight of it gave me a feeling of depression, and I had a foretaste of the emptiness there would be in life should ...
— A Little Union Scout • Joel Chandler Harris
... the silence of the plain, the vastness, the emptiness, the seeming purposelessness of it all, irritated and oppressed her spirit. And she so yearned to be where the world was ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... was their intercourse, viewed in Opdyke's eyes, to Scott it filled the whole horizon, the one near and vital fact which broke in upon its emptiness and cut away the barren wastes about him. He lived alternately upon the memory of Opdyke as he had seen him last, and upon the anticipations of their next meeting. His hours of table service, ceasing to be wearisome, had become veritable social functions, for was ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... good Parker," 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
... counsel of the Lord, that shall stand.' Compare this fern leaf with the mighty palaces of Babylon and Nineveh. Through untold ages this has kept its wavy fragile outline, they are marked only by 'the line of confusion and the stones of emptiness.'" ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... the wonderful working of a man's mind who comes face to face with Eternity and the reality of God. Some men at home will possibly be inclined to sneer at such a condition of mind, but those of us who have been through it know full well the emptiness of such home-bred objections, which certainly do not hold amid the issues of life and death which are found at ...
— With The Immortal Seventh Division • E. J. Kennedy and the Lord Bishop of Winchester
... inn was in its middle-day emptiness and somnolence. Where Anna-Felicitas and Elliott had been sitting cool and shaded when he passed before, there was only the pressed-down grass and crushed flowers in a glare of sun. She had gone home long ago of course. She said she was going to be very busy. Secretly ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... Emptiness; that was the doctor's initial sensation: his vitals had been whisked out of him and the earth from under his feet. All his interest in Ruth, all his care and solicitude, could now be translated into a single word—love. Wanted her out of the way because he had been afraid ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... than Father McGrath never lived even in Connaught; he took a look in at dinner time as a personal favour; and whatever might be the state of his larder, his heart was always full, and the emptiness of the former never troubled him. He had not the slightest shame at asking any one to eat potatoes and cold mutton. They all knew him, and what they were likely to get at his house, and if they did not ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • 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 Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... replied the mate, in a reproving tone, "see the emptiness of riches, and how little they can do to satisfy the cravings of the human heart. There is enough wealth there at your feet to make you and me independently rich for life, and yet you complain because ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... not finish. It was not worth while. George Cannon had not understood. He did not feel as she felt, and her emotion was incommunicable to him. A tremendous misgiving seized her, and she had a physical feeling of emptiness in the stomach. It passed, swiftly as a hallucination. Just such a misgiving as visits nearly every normal person immediately before or immediately after marriage! She ignored it. She was engaged—that was the paramount fact! She was engaged, and ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... have missed the turn?" We ran on a little farther, and suddenly he stopped the motor with a jerk. We were at a cross-road, with a stream running under the bank on our right. The place looked like an abandoned stoneyard. I never saw completer ruin. To the left, a fortified gate gaped on emptiness; to the right, a mill-wheel hung in the stream. Everything else was ...
— Coming Home - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... Winckelmann towards the 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 ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... 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, friend, I say: If thou wilt we must hear thee; ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... enough, too soon comes Death; This slippery globe of life whirls of itself, Hasting our youth away into the dark; These senses, quivering with electric heats, Too soon will show, like nests on wintry boughs Obtrusive emptiness, too palpable wreck, Which whistling north-winds line with downy snow Sometimes, or fringe with foliaged rime, in vain, 20 Thither the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... was a real misfortune as far as I was concerned. For only then did I come to realize how much I was attached to the girl. I felt an utter emptiness in my heart; I began to feel myself a total stranger in the house. When everybody was talking merrily, I kept quiet, as if I were a mourner. I was always looking for Marusya, I was always trying to catch her eye. I hoped that our eyes ...
— In Those Days - The Story of an Old Man • Jehudah Steinberg
... recognition by the proposed treaty of the independence of the United Provinces. Ambiguous words had been purposely made use of in this regard, he was to explain, so that not only the foreign ambassadors were of opinion that the rights of Spain were not curtailed, but the emptiness of the imaginary recognition of Dutch freedom had been proved by the sharp criticism ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... was all over and he turned his back on her for ever, the splendid glow of renunciation began to fade. Life stretched before him, a black limitless emptiness. He wished agonizedly that Arabesque had gone mad and bolted and that he had stopped him and saved his rider's life, dying gloriously and at once, instead of miserably and by inches, like this. He felt that in a moment the pain in his throat ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... and passengers were released, but the sassafras, the beaver skins, and the lumber went to heal and warm and house Frenchmen instead of Englishmen, and Thomas Weston's pockets still cried out with their emptiness. Happily for the world, however, the Frenchmen did not appreciate the "Relation," and it went peacefully on in Robert Cushman's mails, and reached good George ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... conviction that it 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!" started up with a sense of being caught, and saw the maid's ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... the weight and wonder less, If, lifted from immortal shoulders down, The worlds were cast on seas of emptiness In realms without ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... Its glittering emptiness it brings — This little lane of useless things. Here peering envy arm in arm With ennui ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... the men listening to Andrew and knew why they agreed. He knew the inward emptiness of fear—fear of a future they could not know. Andrew was right; their peril was increasing every day. But Jesus shook his head. "My followers," he said, "do not think that I was sent to bring peace to this nation. I came to bring strife. It cannot be any other way. Men enter the Kingdom of God ...
— Men Called Him Master • Elwyn Allen Smith
... said Byron, "was much more disgusted with any human production than with the eternal nonsense, and tracasseries, and emptiness, and ill-humour, and vanity of this young person; but he has some talent, and is a man of honour, and has dispositions of amendment. Therefore use your interest for him, for he is improved and improvable;" and, in a letter ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... nocturnes and one of Schubert's impromptus, while the "Lorelei" and the "Erlking" and the Scottish airs never wearied him. Music thus became a chief consolation during these lonely days—rich organ harmonies that filled the emptiness of his heart and beguiled from dull, material surroundings back into worlds and dreams that he had ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... of the gay season of Edinburgh, Alicia expected to find all the vanity, emptiness, and frivolity of London dissipation, without its varied brilliancy and elegant luxury; yet, so much was it the habit of her mind to look to the fairest side of things, and to extract some advantage from every situation in ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... of the 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
... the house, the girl watched him, both hands at her breast, her eyes wide, her lips parted, her cheeks flushed, until the somber shadows of twilight came down and swallowed him. Then, oppressed with a sudden sense of the emptiness of the world, she ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... changed all this. The gay and thoughtless belle, the accomplished and beautiful leader of society, awoke at once to a new life. The soul of whose existence she had been almost as unconscious as Fouque's Undine, began to assert its powers, and the gay and fashionable woman, no longer ennuyed by the emptiness and frivolity of life, found her thoughts and hands alike fully occupied, and rose into a sphere of life and action, of which, a month before, she would have considered ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... the floor a thick round ink-pot, whose continual rolling on its side made me look down; and there I saw a flat square book with black covers, which curved half-open of itself, for it had been wet and stained. This I took, and went back to the Speranza: for that ship was nothing but an emptiness, and a stench of the crude elements of life, nearly assimilated now to the rank deep to which she was wedded, and soon to be absorbed into its nature and being, to become a sea in little, as I, in time, my God, shall be nothing ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... that she might tire of her solitude and come down to Naples, if only for a few days; or at least, that something might happen to break what promised to be a long separation. He longed for a sight of her, and said so now and then, for letter-writing could not fill up the aching emptiness she had left in his already empty life. He had not her occupations and interests to absorb his days and make each hour seem too short, and, moreover, he loved her, whereas she was not at ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... Exercises ... are used in the school.... Give him" (Harry) "my very kind regards, and say that his little bedroom here looks to me desolate until he comes; but I cannot flatter him that I have anything to fill up the emptiness of heart he will feel when he loses not only papa and mamma, but also his faithful coadjutor in study— Annie! Seriously, you will have to consider about his evening amusements, for it will not do to be studying morning and night. What think ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... 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 ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... what 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
... this land in the bright sunshine of the early morning, their ears, that had so long heard nothing but the slat of canvas and the rush and bubble of water under the prows, filled at last with the great resounding roar of the breakers on the coral reef; their eyes, that had so long looked upon blue emptiness and the star-spangled violet arch of night, feasting upon the living green of the foliage ashore; and the easterly breeze carrying to their eager nostrils the perfumes of land. Amid an excitement and joyful anticipation that it is exhilarating even to think about the cables were got ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... itself vitally,—like a cuttle-fish sucking to an inch of rock,—and drifts out palsied feelers of recognition into the ocean of God's universe, just as languid as the aforesaid Hindoo's hold upon the Kalpas of emptiness ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... cabman to drop him at the corner of Chancery Lane, and he ascended the brilliantly-lighted staircase leading to the dining-saloon of The London, and seated himself at one of the snug tables with a confused sense of emptiness and weariness, rather than any agreeable sensation of healthy hunger. He had come to the luxurious eating-house to dine, because it was absolutely necessary to eat something somewhere, and a great deal easier to get a very good dinner ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... for a master. We seek without ceasing some pilot passion to which we can surrender our heavy burden of freedom. The dry-rot destruction of this individualistic age has worm-eaten into marriage; we have sought to drown pain and the exhaustion of our souls, to fill emptiness with pleasure, to place the personal good in marriage above the racial duty, to forget responsibility, to arrogate for the unimportant Self, and, in so doing, inevitably we have turned away from essential things. Can't you see that we are so terribly tired of this search for something ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... nation. Against that evil muckraking ought to be 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 nothing but the insolence of the routineer ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... know! I know!— The ceaseless ache, the emptiness, the woe— The pang of loss— The strength that sinks beneath so sore a cross. 'Heedless and careless, still the world wags on, And leaves me broken,... Oh, ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger
... inexpressibly saddened. He was suddenly aware of a great emptiness. What would a Sunday be without Dede? And Sundays without end without her? He drummed perplexedly on ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... with costly white material which were used when Amaryllis set her table in her andronitis, and at the arches leading into the interior of the house there were draperies. But the chamber, with all its richness, had a splendid emptiness that ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... service, others into trade, others write.... Grigorovitch and you think I am clever. Yes, I am at least so far clever as not to conceal from myself my disease, and not to deceive myself, and not to cover up my own emptiness with other people's rags, such as the ideas of the sixties, and so on. I am not going to throw myself like Garshin over the banisters, but I am not going to flatter myself with hopes of a better future either. I am not to blame for my disease, ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... Saint Francis because they understood him too well. They hastened to suppress this teaching against science, although it was the life of Francis's doctrine. He taught that the science of the schools led to perdition because it was puffed up with emptiness and pride. Humility, simplicity, poverty were alone true science. They alone led to heaven. Before the tribunal of Christ, the schoolmen would be condemned, "and, with their dark logic (opinionibus tenebrosis) shall be plunged into outer darkness with the spirits of the ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... at the 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 his ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... 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: ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... outer planet far behind. She had crossed the orbits of three others. The last of these was a gas giant with innumerable moonlets revolving about it. It was now some thirty millions of miles back and twenty to one side. The sun, ahead, flared and flamed in emptiness against that ...
— The Aliens • Murray Leinster
... ambition is a matter of CRIMINAL OSTENTATION, like that of the bullying pugilist, seeking the belt—the desperate determination to shine and boast as the master power in the field of war, which is to-day the insane ostentation fostered by the leading powers of Europe. Vanity, literally meaning emptiness, is the antithesis of wisdom, and military vanity is a half-way station on the road ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... week Lewis missed his father very much. Every time he came into the flat its emptiness struck him, robbed him of gaiety, and made him feel as though he walked in a dead man's shoes. He ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... in her sorrows. There are those who refuse to be comforted. The condolence of friends seems only a mockery; and truly, nothing so shows the emptiness and poverty of human nature ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... 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 him, ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... into 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 ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... 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
... field was described by the Germans as "an emptiness." The term is intended to emphasize that the old martial display and pomp has completely gone. A grand advance upon each other, with trumpets sounding, banners fluttering, brilliant uniforms, and splendid cavalry charges, was impossible with long range weapons ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... criticism, its dissipation of the very conceivability of the central and most incisive of sensible phenomena, it was a real support to Parmenides in his assertion of the nullity of all that is but phenomenal, leaving open and unoccupied space (emptiness, we might say) to that which really is. That which is, so purely, or absolutely, that it is nothing at all to our mixed powers of apprehension:—Parmenides and the Eleatic School were much occupied with the determination of the thoughts, or of the mere phrases and words, that ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... shall my cactus bloom once more, my jeweled lizards crawl unmolested and the cry of the coyote echo again through the vast, soundless spaces of my desolation. Then to my looms, to my looms and out of emptiness and silence and space and light to weave all mysteries of color and all illusions ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... like you could bite into something? I got an emptiness inside me as big as all outdoors. How about a mouthful of cereal and a shirred egg? Now, for the love of Mike," he went on quickly, as his godson opened his mouth to speak, "don't say 'What's shirred?' It's something you do to eggs. It's one way ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... two stately trees; the neat walk, the wide verandah, the dim, mysterious hall; the rooms, heavily shaded to save the rich carpets; the order, the precision, the fixedness, the this-sits-here and that-stands-thereness—the flatness and emptiness and formality of it all, and she turned again to the Elden kitchen and laughed—a soft, rippling, irrepressible laugh, as irrepressible as the laughter of the mountain stream amid the evergreens. Then she thought of her mother; ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... would be gone. A matter of minutes and I should never have seen him at all. But that could not have been. I refused to contemplate a life at St. Peter's in which this inestimable amelioration (now nearly five minutes old) played no part. The hopeless emptiness of life at the Orphanage without a meeting with Ted was something altogether too harrowing to be dwelt upon. It could not have ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... likewise upon the emptiness of his pockets, turned over the papers in his pocket-book, and convinced himself of the state of absolute destitution in which he ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the desert I love to ride. With the silent Bush-boy alone by my side, Away, away, in the wilderness vast Where the white man's foot hath never passed, And the quivered Coranna or Bechuan Hath rarely crossed with his roving clan,— A region of emptiness, howling and drear, Which man hath abandoned from famine and fear; Which the snake and the lizard inhabit alone, With the twilight bat from the yawning stone; Where grass, nor herb, nor shrub takes root, Save poisonous thorns that pierce the foot; And the bitter-melon, ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... insignificant by comparison with food and drink in their minds. The hatred and fear of man, as man, was blotted out of sight by the craving for animal food in any shape whatsoever. Here was a living trail, in the midst of a dead, burnt-up land of starvation and emptiness. What Finn's thoughts on the subject may have been I cannot say. But, of course, he had connected men with food all his life long. And now he was starving. I do not think Finn's thoughts could have been quite the same as those of the rest of the pack; ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... upon the rubbish of the cellar; he raised a black beam a little and thrust himself under. Feeling ahead, he found more rubbish, which he cleared; and then, beyond, his hand found emptiness and the smell of earth — and the odor of people and the closeness of foul air. But there was no ...
— The Boy Allies with Haig in Flanders • Clair W. Hayes
... had fallen asleep upon the sofa in the inner room; but when he went in search of him, he found nothing but emptiness. He rang the bell violently, and the ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... rushed 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 a recurrent ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... was the act of a moment. To release the tethered pony the work of another; then swift as a great brown shadow, out across the whitening prairie to the spot he remembered last to have seen the herd, the delinquent urged the willing broncho—only to find emptiness; not even the ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... know not what to feel. When death foils love we know not what to know. Now did his doubt hope, now did his hope doubt. Now what his wish dreamed the dream's sense did flout And to a sullen emptiness congeal. Then again the gods ...
— Antinous: A Poem • Fernando Antonio Nogueira Pessoa
... mother, she had read, she had embroidered, and then read again. What was Betty doing—what was she thinking now? She laid her book down in her lap, and covering her face with her hands, breathed a desperate little prayer. That life should be pain and emptiness to herself, seemed somehow natural since she had married Nigel—but pain and emptiness for Betty—No! No! No! Not for Betty! Piteous sorrow poured upon her like a flood. She did not know how the time passed. She sat, huddled together in her ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... always, in the aimless din and multiplicity of streets he felt himself most securely at home. The smear of gestures, the elastic distortion of crowds winding and unwinding under the tumult of windows, gave him the feeling of a geometrical emptiness of life. ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... the offer, and was well pleased at finding his purse replenished, for its emptiness had caused him serious trouble. Cuthbert's steed was led by one of the archers, and he himself walked gayly alongside of Sir Ernest, followed by his retainers. Another long day's march brought them down to ...
— The Boy Knight • G.A. Henty
... curious sensation of weakness and emptiness in my head—as if it were hollow, and a strange disinclination, almost inability, to speak or think. Suddenly this passed away, and the events which I have related in the previous chapters rushed back upon my ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... important enterprise, his Senora gives a croak expressive of her readiness to follow, and is after him like his own shadow. Similarly, when la Senora Coco dives into the depths of an old boot in quest of emptiness, her ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... rejecting all their own righteousness, worthiness, interest, and sufficiency, and choosing and appropriating him to themselves, for their righteousness, worthiness, portion, and sufficiency, under a sight and conviction of their own emptiness and deformity; and with a heart-satisfied persuasion of the loveliness and ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... the Baron, sends this to you," he said. "He bids you eat the corn, and swallow with it the suspicion that you feel. You have sat all day with other chiefs, but your brother the Baron has not seen you. His lodge cries out with emptiness. He bids you ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... the most powerful soothing influences which can be had, is found in the lather of M'Clinton's soap, so often recommended in these pages. Applied to the skin over a stomach which has been rejecting all food, and even retching on emptiness, for hours, it will almost at once stop the irritation. Applied to the head it is invaluable (see Brain; Head; Hearing, etc.), and in many cases we have known it perform almost miracles of soothing effect. But the lather must be rightly made, and none ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... was going to lose her. He had found out that he loved her only in time to feel the wrench of parting from her all the more keenly. What was he to do with himself after she was gone? What could he turn to in order to fill up the great emptiness that her going would leave in his daily life? And was she never to know how dear she was to him? Why not speak to her, why not tell her that he loved her? But Condy knew that Blix did not love him, and the knowledge of that must keep him silent; he must hug his secret ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... poured into her heart, that she was being taken to the place where she would be with the one human being whose presence blotted out even the memory of the false world and gave to her the true. And whereas in the dead years she had sometimes been afraid of feeling too much the emptiness and the desolation of her life, she was now afraid of feeling too little its fulness and its splendour, was afraid of some day looking back to this superb moment of her earthly fate, and being conscious that she had ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... the downs has a repelling effect. Like Gilpin they love not an undecorated earth; and false and ridiculous as Gilpin's taste may seem to me and to all those who love the chalk, which "spoils everything" as Gilpin said, he certainly expresses a feeling common to those who are unaccustomed to the emptiness and silence of ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... poet once in his lifetime has to come to this Calvary, to hang through his black hour on the cross, and send out after the faithless deity his Lama Sabachthani. For Rickman no agony could compare with that isolation and emptiness of soul. He could see nothing beyond that hour, for he had never felt anything like it before, not even on waking in the morning after getting drunk. His ideas had always come back again when he was in a fit state to receive them. But this time, though he had not ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... gambling, versed in cunning and imposture, this gambler conversant with the ways of deceiving, will vanquish the Pandavas in battle! With Karna in thy company, thou hadst often joyfully boasted, from folly and emptiness of understanding, in the hearing of Dhritarashtra, saying, 'O sire, myself, and Karna, and my brother Duhsasana, these three, uniting together, will slay the sons of Pandu in battle.' This thy boast was heard in every meeting of the court. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... of generosity of detail. "As Hollingsworth once told me, I lack a purpose," he writes, at the close of his story. "How strange! He was ruined, morally, by an over plus of the same ingredient the want of which, I occasionally suspect, has rendered my own life all an emptiness. I by no means wish to die. Yet were there any cause in this whole chaos of human struggle, worth a sane man's dying for, and which my death would benefit, then—provided, however, the effort did not involve an unreasonable amount of trouble—methinks I might be bold to offer ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... Do you think now, that when John Nokes, aged nineteen, goes into market at Cambridge, or elsewhere, and 'lists, and never goes home again; do you think, I say, that that lad don't feel a very strange emptiness about the epigastric region when he thinks of the grey-headed old man, that is sitting waiting for him at the cottage-door? And," added Halbert, standing on the plunging-stage Adamically, without a rag upon him, pointing at Jim with his ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... 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, because some bit of knowledge which his instructor ...
— Children and Their Books • James Hosmer Penniman
... of sobbing, the wan, heartrending smiles, the spells of crushing silence full of emptiness and ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... went away, as no one knew that incomparable blonde. Yet she had often been to the opera, but in an unpretentious way—in the second tier of boxes. And to Prince Agenor above the first tier of boxes there was nothing, absolutely nothing. There was emptiness—space. The prince had never been in a second-tier box, so the second-tier boxes did ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... stately and semi-comfortable; there are book cases sprinkled with the sparse library of a country lawyer, but lately plethoric, like the thin body which has departed in its coffin. They are taking away Mr. Lincoln's private effects, to deposit them wheresoever his family may abide, and the emptiness of the place, on this sunny Sunday, revives that feeling of desolation from which the land has scarce recovered. I rise from my seat and examine the maps; they are from the coast survey and engineer departments, and exhibit all the ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... first to see it, and when he shouted the tidings my heart beat fast with joy. The famished crew have forgotten their disconsolate stomachs and are dancing about the deck. 'T is not I, forsooth, who shall restrain them! A month of emptiness upon a heavy sea is preparation for any folly. Nofuhl alone is without enthusiasm. The old ...
— The Last American - A Fragment from The Journal of KHAN-LI, Prince of - Dimph-Yoo-Chur and Admiral in the Persian Navy • J. A. Mitchell
... sailorly instinct, of which I have no recollection whatever, had taken a turn of the rope under my arms and round the yard, and so kept me from slipping away. But I woke up to agonies of cold—a sodden deadness of the limbs which set me wondering numbly if I had any legs left—and a gnawing hunger and emptiness. I felt no thirst; perhaps because my body was so soaked with water. In the same dull way the horrors of the previous day came back on me, and I wondered heavily if my dead comrades had ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... one backward glance at Dale, but he had forgotten her existence and was poring over the battles of Pompey. Such indifference did not hurt her now:—it was the emptiness of that door! Still staring, silently beating her hands together in impotent rage, her face burning with mortification, two big tears rolled down her cheeks and fell upon the rug. Mac whined. He did not ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... boulevard were standing in front of the fashionable garment shops that occupied the city end of the drive. He had an unusual, oppressive feeling of idleness; it was the first time since he had left the little Ohio college, where he had spent his undergraduate years, that he had known this emptiness of purpose. There was nothing for him to do now, except to dine at the Hitchcocks' to-night. There would be little definite occupation probably for weeks, months, until he found some practice. Always hitherto, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... help himself, for she dropped to the ground, and went wading about in the wet grass and mud, and at length flew off without giving him a morsel. Then the disappointed youngster cuddled up to a brother crow baby, and both lifted up their voices and lamented the emptiness ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... before I came here to-day. I saw it the moment I stood here. Love is the very breath of life to you, surpassingly more than to any one else I have ever seen; and that is why you have suffered so terribly from the disappointments and emptiness of life. And now, when love is calling to you—love that is true and sincere—you ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... full half an hour with inimitable spirit, emptiness and unfairness." "In a light, scoffing tone, florid and fluent, he assured us there was nothing in the idea of evolution; rock-pigeons were what rock-pigeons had always been. Then, turning to his antagonist with a smiling ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... principalities and powers! Fellow-feeling was all-pervading as this moonlight, which she had said would be the same in Germany—as this white ghostly glamour that wrapped the trees, making the orange lamps so quaint and decoratively useless out in the narrow square, where emptiness and silence reigned. He looked around into her face—in spite of bistre and powder, and the faint rouging on her lips, it had a queer, unholy, touching beauty. And he had suddenly the strangest feeling, ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... 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 ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... no Aurelia sprang into her father's arms. Only a little terrier came barking out into the dismal paved hall. Into every room they looked, the old woman asseverating denials that it was of no use, they might see for themselves, that no one had been there for years past. Full of emptiness, indeed, with faded grimy family portraits on the walls, moth-eaten carpets and cushions, high-backed chairs with worm-holes; and yet, somehow, there was one room that did look as if it had recently been sat in. Two little stools ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... therefore, to leave the support of the wall, she rang the bell. The door did not open, and all her shame and fear suddenly abandoned her; she rang again and again, as though in spite of its emptiness she could drag some response out of that closed room, some recompense for the shame and fear that visit had cost her. It did not open; she left off ringing, and, sitting down at the top of the stairs, buried her ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... musique, and so home, and there to read a little, and eat a little, though I find that my having so little taste do make me so far neglect eating that, unless company invite, I do not love to spend time upon eating, and so bring emptiness and the Cholique. So to bed. This day I hear that Prince Rupert and Holmes do go to sea: and by this there is a seeming friendship and peace among our great seamen; but the devil a bit is there any love ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... those benumbed lips would not quiver. No! everything was motionless; the very seaweed, among which the surf had cast him, seemed to have congealed; even the gulls had flown away—there was not a fragment anywhere, not a plank or any broken rigging. There was emptiness everywhere ... only he—and I—and the foaming sea in the distance. I cast a glance behind me; the same emptiness was there; a chain of hillocks on the ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... art which arose with Winckelmann towards the 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
... the pioneers were keenly conscious of their isolation. The emptiness of the land seemed to press upon their breasts, hindering free breathing. Moreover, their nerves were still jangling as a ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... freeholds whose masters might be equally likely to see the prudence of being in their watch-towers when the English allies were passing. Barred across by the shadows of its mighty trees, the great road stretched away mile after mile in cool emptiness. At rare intervals, a mounted messenger clattered over the stones, his hand upon his weapon, his eyes rolling sharply in a keen watch of the thicket on either side. Still more rarely, foraging parties swept through the morning stillness, lowing cows pricked to a ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... to lengthen intolerably, to stretch out into a desert of emptiness, to become fateful with a bitterness too poignant to be uttered. Crowther said no more. He had had his say. He waited with unswerving patience ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... thing. And may not her uneasiness, her eagerness to question and dispute, arise from a sort of intellectual hunger? Ah, from such hunger, which many women must suffer throughout their lives, from want of literary food,—from such an emptiness of the soul arise disquiet, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... creative touch and a magnetic presence such as few women possess. I believe that she could not be for twenty-four hours in the barrenest and ugliest room possible, without contriving to diffuse a certain enchantment through all its emptiness. ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... passed over as frivolous. And yet, but for one reason, to that whole European world whose progress we are now inheriting, this view would have seemed not only not untenable, but even obvious. The emptiness of the things of this life, the incompleteness of even its highest pleasures, and their utter powerlessness to make us really happy, has been, at least for fifteen hundred years, a commonplace, both with saints and sages. The conception that anything in this life could of itself ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... between the musical numbers, her feet crossed, her hands reposing on her lap. But in the intimacy of their life her grey, unabashed gaze forced upon him the sensation of something inexplicable reposing within her; stupidity or inspiration, weakness or force—or simply an abysmal emptiness, reserving itself even in the moments of ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... not to bring about a juster treatment of the Christians.[386] He wished to represent their cause as the good contrasted with the bad, wisdom as opposed to error, truth in contradistinction to outward seeming, hypocrisy, and pretentious emptiness. His "Address to the Greeks" begins with a violent polemic against all Greek philosophers. Tatian merely acted up to a judgment of philosophers and philosophy which in Justin's case is still concealed.[387] Hence it was not possible ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... girls happen to be right. Your planet was settled by men whose ships crossed the emptiness of space as your caroj pass over the desert. Your people have forgotten about that and lost the science and knowledge you once had, but in other worlds ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... of capital being, indeed, the stone of Sisyphus with a vengeance, crushing in its recoil). But, throughout, the old ideas of the cloud power and cloud feebleness,—the deceit of its hiding,—and the emptiness of its banishing,—the Autolycus enchantment of making black seem white,—and the disappointed fury of Ixion (taking shadow for power), mingle in the moral meaning of this and its collateral legends; and give an aspect, ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... deeper—lips no more red—teeth no whiter—nor was the perfect oval of her sun-kissed cheek any the more perfect. Yet, there was something—the indefinable something that marks the transition of a beautiful girl from beautiful girlhood to glorious womanhood.... He felt a strange emptiness within him; it was almost as though he were appalled by ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... could have been audible where she stood above the hubbub of music, laughter, and stamping feet that rose from below. It filled the night with uproar. Nor was there anything but emptiness in the narrow side-street into ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... which, forms of discomfort and annoyance, linger on to this day. The playhouse, in short, was almost a place of physical torture, and it is still rarely in Paris a place of physical ease. Add to this the old thinness of the school of Scribe and the old emptiness of the thousand vaudevillistes; which part of the exhibition, till modern comedy began, under the younger Dumas and Augier, had for its counterpart but the terrible dead weight, or at least the prodigious prolixity and absurdity, of much, not to say of most, of the romantic and melodramatic ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... said, "I guess you don't." His emptiness bowed out before a wave of bitterness. He had rested his hand on the gate, as close to hers as he had dared. Now he saw that while it was inches away from hers in one sense, it was light years away in another. He removed it angrily. "Business always comes first ...
— The Servant Problem • Robert F. Young
... not taking hands, they swung slowly through the unpeopled emptiness, leaving a tiny scattering of tracks behind, the blue-white ice firm under their feet through a light film of snow. The ice-boat was out of sight, the sprightly and unexpurgated ballad of "Amos Moss," rendered in the closest ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... could not be consoled in this way. He could see no reason why his ray acting upon the emptiness of a cavern should produce the effect he beheld. Moreover, if the ray had revealed a cavern of considerable extent he could not expect that it could now pass through it, for the limit of its operations was almost reached. His electric cumulators would cease to ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... pipe—as dry and unsympathetic as, contrariwise, the singer was warm-hearted and full of the very sap of human kindness. The minister was so absorbed in his own full-hearted praise that he was scarce conscious that he was almost alone in the chill emptiness of the church. Indeed, a strange feeling stole upon him, that he heard his wife's voice singing the solemn gladness of the last verse along with him, as they had sung it together near forty years ago when she had first come to the hill kirk ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... us, life in you.'—In us, emptiness, weakness, suffering, pressure, perplexity. In you life—life—life! As if Paul would say, 'the more I am pressed above measure, the more the life of Jesus is abundant in its outflow, and in its quickening of other lives.' This is the apostolic life. Through the Eternal Spirit, Christ offered Himself ...
— Parables of the Christ-life • I. Lilias Trotter
... there were some of those who landed there, who, on seeing the pale cliff behind, believed, with a deep curiosity, that some very sacred and beautiful thing must there be enshrined. But it was the emptiness of the further land, Hugh thought, that made it imperative to guard the mystery. In that bare land indeed he himself seemed to pace, bitterly pondering; he would even kneel on the bare rocks, and hold out his hands in intense entreaty to the God who had made him, and who withdrew Himself so relentlessly ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... arctic storm was crashing in a mighty fury, as if striving to beat down the little cabin that had dared to rear itself in the dun-gray emptiness at the top of the world, eight hundred miles from civilization. There were curious waitings, strange screeching sounds, and heart-breaking meanings in its strife, and when at last its passion died away and there followed a strange quiet, the two men could feel the frozen earth under their feet ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... this luxurious apartment to herself. Something about its air of rich privacy, its diffusion of that sympathetic quality in other countries so conspicuously absent from the public show-room, seemed to emphasize its present emptiness. It was as though the flowers, the carpet, the lounges, surrounded their visitor's solitary advance with the mute assurance that they had done all they could toward making the thing "go off," and that if they ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... our very council bringest thou Children of reprobation and perdition? Darkness thy deeds and emptiness thy speech, Such images thou raisest as buffoons Carry in merriment on festivals; Nor worthiness nor wisdom would display To public notice their deformities, Nor cherish them nor fear them; ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor
... dim, their vessel being already farther away; and then, all at once, the men of the Marie found they had nothing to push against, nothing at the end of their poles—all spars, oars, odds and ends of deck-lumber, were groping and quivering in emptiness, till they fell heavily, one after the other, down into the sea, like their own arms, lopped off ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... result of this inability to communicate with one another is that every product of their co-operative action bears the stamp of discord, not only because it fails to meet their real needs, but because of the very emptiness of those all-powerful words and notions already mentioned. To the misery already at hand, man thus adds the curse of convention—that is to say, the agreement between words and actions without an agreement between the feelings. Just as, during ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... chuckled, "an' I do hope Miss Ann ain't gonter take away her appletite for dinner by eatin' all this toas' an' drinkin' this whole pot er tea, kase I tell you now ol' Billy's stomic air done stuck to his back with emptiness." ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... repose, took his departure homewards with the dervish. Ample stores of all necessaries for her accommodation had been laid in, and slaves male and female were left for her attendance and protection. Not many days, had elapsed when an incident occurred, clearly proving the emptiness of human caution against the predestination of fate. The prince of Eerauk being upon a hunting excursion outrode his attendants, and missing his way, reached the gate of the cavern leading to the mansion, which was guarded by two black slaves, who ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... prisoner, marched with other prisoners 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... 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, though, I resisted ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... tempted by the frivolities of a fashionable social life that lives by its vanity, its excitement, its rivalry and flirtation. Not that all fashionable society is open to such reproach, but its tendency is to lightness and emptiness; and we rarely find really valuable men who seek it. Therefore a lady who would make her house attractive to the best society must offer it something higher than that to which we may give the generic title fashion. Dress, music, dancing, supper, are delightful accessories-they ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... down the stairs, curtains were drawn back, and Maggie was sitting, quite suddenly, in a large desert of gold and red plush, with emptiness on every side of it and a hungry-looking crowd of people behind a wooden partition staring at her in such a way that she felt as though she had no clothes on. She gave a hurried glance at these people ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... scruples to the winds. Even the fear that Aniela might be unhappy loving me must give way before the great truth, great as the universe, that the presence of Love fills the life; gives sustenance to it, and is a hundred thousand times worth more than emptiness and ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... 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 ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... fields under a blazing sun, the cattle seeking shade wherever it was to be had, crowding at the water-holes, browsing early and late and frequenting the cooler canons during the heat of the days. And nights of stars and a vast silence and emptiness. ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... still rang in his ears,—the warmth of her kiss still lingered on his lips,—he loved her! ... he worshipped her! ... why, why had she left him "lost" as she herself had said, in a world that was mere emptiness without ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... lighter than a leaf Unwittingly whirled onward by a brief Autumnal eddy; but when the fatal door Suddenly yielded him to life once more, And issuing to the all-consoling skies He turned to seek the sunlight in her eyes, He clutched at emptiness—she was not there; And the dim warder answered to his prayer: "Only once have I seen the wonder wrought. But when Alcestis thus her master sought, Living she sought him not, nor dreamed that fate For any subterfuge would swing my ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... of vanities, 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 touch of the splendor it loves. Poor Alvira was another ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... a moment after the throwing had ceased. "He has gone round to the back. Keep as you are. We take cover now." He pressed behind the arras of an extemporized wardrobe, and the spirit of emptiness and desolation seemed once more to reign over ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... cruiser and carried into Isle Dieu. Two weeks later the vessel, crew, and passengers were released, but the sassafras, the beaver skins, and the lumber went to heal and warm and house Frenchmen instead of Englishmen, and Thomas Weston's pockets still cried out with their emptiness. Happily for the world, however, the Frenchmen did not appreciate the "Relation," and it went peacefully on in Robert Cushman's mails, and reached good George ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... appeared a work from the pen of the brilliant Norwegian writer, Laura Marholm, called "Woman, a Character Study." She was one of the first to call attention to the emptiness and narrowness of the existing conception of woman's emancipation and its tragic effect upon the inner life of woman. In her work she speaks of the fate of several gifted women of international fame: The genius, Eleanora Duse; the great mathematician and writer, ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... band of resolute men and women offered prayer to Him whose is the earth and the fulness, or the emptiness, thereof. ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... shoulder of a Kendah man, I drew nearer to see what passed between them, for my curiosity overcame my faintness. For quite a long while she stared at him, till suddenly her eyes began to change. It was as though a soul were arising in their emptiness as the moon arises in the quiet evening sky, giving them light and life. At length she spoke in a slow, hesitating voice, the tones of which I remembered ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... that he had often discussed with his friend the Mayor the philosophy of money. "I recollect very well," he said, "once entering into the question with him, when I was twenty years younger than I am now, and saying that I saw a great deal of emptiness about this money-getting; that many were striving for that which they thought would make them happy, but that it was like a bubble upon the water—no sooner caught than burst.... Had I," he afterwards said, "been of noble birth, or traced my origin (like some in this room) to those who came in ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... Commissary business was "dead busted," our afflicted Commissary would tell us there was nothing, with such a rueful visage, that it made us sorry we did not have something to give him, and made us feel our own emptiness all the more, that it ...
— From the Rapidan to Richmond and the Spottsylvania Campaign - A Sketch in Personal Narration of the Scenes a Soldier Saw • William Meade Dame
... 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 ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... done. This settles it. They used to fetch and carry for me, and now . . . I've licked their boots, have I? I'm their man, their tool, their chattel. It's the bottom rung of the ladder of shame. I sound with my foot, and there's nothing underneath but the black emptiness of damnation. Ah, Deacon, Deacon, and so this is where you've been travelling all these years; and it's for this that you learned French! The gallows . . . God help me, it begins to dog me like my shadow. THERE'S a step to take! And the jerk upon your spine! How's a man to die ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson
... mind remained unallayed. Was all my life to be a hunger and a questioning? I complained of my teachers, who stuffed my head with facts and gave my soul no crumb to feed on. I blamed the stars for their silence. I sat up nights brooding over the emptiness of knowledge, and ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... the feet of the Frenchman who has to speak of 1793,—the terrible year of the modern epoch! The delirium of the Terror haunts most of the revolutionary historians, and the choicest examples in all literature of bombast, folly, emptiness, political immorality, inhumanity, formal repudiation of common sense and judgment, are to be found in the rhapsodies which men of letters, some of them men of eminence, call histories of the Revolution, or lives of this or that actor ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... refining discipline, which would else have been borne with benefit, is rendered unbearable, and so misses its end. Excess of government invariably defeats itself by driving away those to be governed. And if over all who desert its entertainments in disgust either at their emptiness or their formality, society thus loses its salutary influence—if such not only fail to receive that moral culture which the company of ladies, when rationally regulated, would give them, but, in default of other relaxation, are driven into habits ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... on its pavements, or the streams of vehicles solidifying or liquefying in its streets. The august groups of Westminster and Parliament did not seem in themselves spectacular; they needed the desertedness of night, and the pour of the moon into the comparative emptiness of the neighborhood, to fill them out to the proportions of their keeping in the memory. Is Trafalgar Square as imposing as it has the chance of being? It is rather scattered and spotty, and wants somehow the magic by which Paris moves ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... divisions, as the times do brawl, Are in three heads: one power against the French, And one against Glendower; perforce a third Must take up us: so is the unfirm king In three divided; and his coffers sound With hollow poverty and emptiness. ...
— King Henry IV, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Chiswick edition]
... are 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
... consumptive as his purse, His aching head did wine and women curse; His fortune ruin'd and his wealth decay'd, 5 Clamorous his duns, his gaming debts unpaid, The youth indignant seiz'd his tailor's bill, And on its back thus wrote with moral quill: 'Various as colours in the rainbow shown, Or similar in emptiness alone, 10 How false, how vain are Man's pursuits below! Wealth, Honour, Pleasure—what can ye bestow? Yet see, how high and low, and young and old Pursue the all-delusive power of Gold. Fond man! should all ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... symptoms mentioned, indigestion may also be accompanied by gastric pain or by uneasiness at the pit of the stomach. It may be a sense of fulness or tightness, or a feeling of distention or weight, or again, a feeling of emptiness, goneness or sinking. Now and then there are burning, tearing, gnawing, dragging sensations under the breast-bone; and there is a general complaint of a capricious appetite, heartburn, vomiting, nervous headache, neuralgia and cold ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... some twelve months of his ex-royal exile! The memories of all this folk, flown guests and masters of the still-abiding palace-chambers, haunt us as we hurry through. They are but filmy shadows. We cannot grasp them, localise them, people surrounding emptiness with more than withering ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... too frivolous an animal to 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 Jupiter had imparted? Or ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... 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 went upstairs, she would creep ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... early youth, he had to encounter disappointments, mortifications, disenchantments, deep moral suffering; then the constant warfare of envy, resulting in cruel, unceasing slanders: then, all the philosophical sadness arising in great minds, the best endowed and the noblest, from the emptiness of earthly things; then that unslakable thirst for the true, the just, the perfect; that sort of nostalgia which the noblest souls experience, because their home is not here, because reality disgusts them, from ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... flatteries, enmity, and guile Murmuring submission, and bald government, 605 (The idol weak as the idolater), And Decency and Custom starving Truth, And blind Authority beating with his staff The child that might have led him; Emptiness Followed as of good omen, and meek Worth 610 Left to ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... waves dashing themselves against the rocks. I had told John that he should be my cave man, and should seize me in his arms and carry me whither he would. I felt somehow that for my development I wanted to get as close to nature as ever I could—that my mind seemed to be reaching out for a great emptiness. But I looked over all the hotel and steamship folders I could find and it seemed impossible to get good accommodation, so we came to New York. I had a great deal of shopping to do for our new house, so I could not be much with John, but I felt it was not right to neglect him, so I drove ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... Laou-tsze affirm that Confucius was very roughly handled by his more ascetic contemporary, who looked down from his somewhat higher standpoint with contempt on the great apostle of antiquity. It was only natural that Laou-tsze, who preached that stillness and self-emptiness were the highest attainable objects, should be ready to assail a man whose whole being was wrapt up in ceremonial observances and conscious well-doing. The very measured tones and considered movements of Confucius, coupled with a certain admixture of that pride which apes humility, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... fury, bent alone with eager haste To swallow it; so dropp'd the loathsome cheeks Of demon Cerberus, who thund'ring stuns The spirits, that they for deafness wish in vain. We, o'er the shades thrown prostrate by the brunt Of the heavy tempest passing, set our feet Upon their emptiness, that substance seem'd. They all along the earth extended lay Save one, that sudden rais'd himself to sit, Soon as that way he saw us pass. "O thou!" He cried, "who through the infernal shades ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... rocky plateau. But it was shrinking, crawling into itself. Spots of light were in the murk overhead; there seemed a distant circular horizon of emptiness around us. ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... been now eighteen months in the bank, and had never even mentioned the name of a fellow clerk. He was one of those youths who take the only possible way for emptiness to make itself of consequence—that of concealment and affected mystery. Not even now but for his father's request, would he have presented his bank friend to him or ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... waterfall: you think you will bestow a little serpent of a gift from my stolen treasures to comfort me. You will comfort me with a lock of Camillo's hair, that I may have it on my breast to-night, and dream, and wail, and writhe, and curse the air I breathe, and clasp the abominable emptiness like a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... one which should be held steadily in view. For the labourer the food must be in part solid, requiring mastication and insalivation, and not rapid of digestion. Food, however nutritious, which is too quickly digested, is soon followed by a sense of hunger and emptiness, and consequent sinking and debility. Food of this description is unsuited to the labourer. It will not maintain strength, nor will it maintain health, and, if long persevered in, it will be followed by some one or other of the prevailing diseases which result immediately ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... were no sparklings there. I turned it back again—and there they were. And what were they like? Realization came to me—they were like the little, dancing, radiant atoms that had played for a time about the emptiness where had stood Sorgar of the Lower Waters before he had been shaken into the nothingness! And that green light ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... 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 study of ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... dashed to pieces, it appears to me of late to be a maelstrom that engulfs everything in its resistless and terrible sweep. Fortune, health, peace, reputation, all are caught and swept away; but the worst is its heartlessness—and its emptiness." ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... spoke to him of the vanity and emptiness of human life, of the worthless baubles for which men exchange all they have, that is to say, their immortal gift of time, which soon passes away and is ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... wild, tearing shriek in the air beside me and something rushed past us with a noise like the passage of a flock of big birds. Both windows rattled as if they would break away from their sashes. Then a sense of emptiness and peace suddenly came over the room, and I knew ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... essential. The reality of a room, for instance, was to be found in the vacant space enclosed by the roof and the walls, not in the roof and walls themselves. The usefulness of a water pitcher dwelt in the emptiness where water might be put, not in the form of the pitcher or the material of which it was made. Vacuum is all potent because all containing. In vacuum alone motion becomes possible. One who could make of himself a vacuum ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... world in which neither parental nor filial love were more than the names of nonentities—Father, Son, Daughter, Child, but empty syllables, which philosophy heeded not—or rather loved them in their emptiness, but despised, hated, or feared them, when for a moment they seemed pregnant with a meaning from heaven, and each in ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... 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 ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... possessed her heart, she would stretch out her arms with a gesture of immense weariness the moment she was left alone. Solitude rendered her low spirited at once, for it brought her face to face with the emptiness and boredom within her. Extremely gay by nature and profession, she became dismal in solitude and would sum up her life in the following ejaculation, which recurred incessantly between ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... two antitheses of my text; and the other is no less profound and significant. 'He was rich; He became poor.' In this connection 'rich' can only mean possessed of the Divine fulness and independence; and 'poor' can only mean possessed of human infirmity, dependence, and emptiness. And so to Jesus of Nazareth, to be born was impoverishment. If there is nothing more in His birth than in the birth of each of us, the words are grotesquely inappropriate to the facts of the case. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... anew. Her desolation came upon her in an overwhelming wave. She turned with a great cry, and threw her arms wide to the risen sun, tottering blindly towards the emptiness that stretched beneath her feet. And as she went, she heard the roar of the torrent dashing down over its grim boulders to the great river up which they two had glided in their dream of enchantment aeons ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... 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 ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... very well from the test. To begin with, this symphony is excessively long—it lasts an hour and a half—though there is no apparent justification for its proportions. It aims at being colossal, and mainly achieves emptiness. The motifs are more than familiar. After a funeral march of commonplace character and boisterous movement, where Beethoven seems to be taking lessons from Mendelssohn, there comes a scherzo, or rather a Viennese waltz, where Chabrier gives old Bach a helping hand. The adagietto has a ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... 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, ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... thousand of his 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 his elbow on ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... penalty of the unpopularity of the first person singular in modern society falls upon the individual. The hard part of it, for a man who has not the daily habit of being a companion to himself, is his own personal private sense of emptiness—of missing things. All the universe gets itself addressed to some one else—a great showy heartless pantomime it rolls over him, beckoning with its nights and days and winds and faces—always beckoning, but to some one else. All that seems to be left to him in a universe is ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... 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
... was at hand, and before that day was over she was to experience that awful emptiness and desolation which those know ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... grace on normal days even to Commercial Street, or to the network of lanes north of the Bethnal Green Road. The pitiless wind swept the streets—swept the children and the grown-ups out of them into the houses, or any available shelter; and in the dark and chilly emptiness of the side roads one might listen in fancy for the stealthy returning steps of spirits crueller than Cold, more tyrannous than Poverty, coming to seize ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... they are singing with emptiness. Our souls are light; they have shaken a burden of hours . . . What did we build it for? Was it all a dream? . . . Ghostly above us in lamplight the towers gleam . . . And after a while they will fall to dust and rain; Or else we will tear them ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... my eyes on the ominous trail; its very emptiness fascinated me, and I dismounted and knelt to examine it where, near a dry, rotten log, some ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... all the quiet emptiness of Norton Pit. The children heard the sheep-bells and Young jim's busy bark above them, and they scrambled up ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... remarked that the stage has arisen from an irresistible longing for the new and extraordinary. Man, oppressed by divided cares, and satiated with sensual pleasure, felt an emptiness or want. Man, neither altogether satisfied with the senses, nor forever capable of thought, wanted a middle state, a bridge between the two states, bringing them into harmony. Beauty and aesthetics supplied that ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... prosperity. She saw without compassion the graying hair, the tired eyes of anxiety, the lines of brooding and despondency deepening in faces she remembered as carefree and hopeful, the look of resignation that comes to the weaklings who have lost their grip, the emptiness of burned-out passion, the weary languor of repeated failure—she saw it all through the eyes of her ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... and went in amongst the budding currant-bushes, the neat gravel-paths and strawberry-beds, that had been erst so cherished by the naval commander. Mr. Carter peered in at the back windows of the house, and through the little casement he saw a vista of emptiness. He listened, but there was no sound of voices or footsteps. The blinds were undrawn, and he could see the bare walls of the rooms, the fireless grates, and that cold bleakness of aspect peculiar to an ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... Professor Max Muller, and can be found in volume xlix. of the Sacred Books of the East ("Buddhist Mahayana Sutras").—Apropos of the magical use of the text, as described in this story, it is worth remarking that the subject of the sutra is the Doctrine of the Emptiness of Forms,—that is to say, of the unreal character of all phenomena or noumena... "Form is emptiness; and emptiness is form. Emptiness is not different from form; form is not different from emptiness. What is form—that is emptiness. What is emptiness—that is form... ...
— Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things • Lafcadio Hearn
... 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
... the eyes of all familiar with the common sordidness of its everyday dress, a picture of artistic loveliness. And after the master's little speech of thanks for their good work that afternoon, and for all their goodness to him, the boys and girls went their ways with that strangely unnameable heart-emptiness that brings an ache to the throat, but somehow makes happier ...
— Glengarry Schooldays • Ralph Connor
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