"Emptiness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... is to me an insupportable torment. That I might not live like a savage, I took it into my head to learn to make laces. Like the women, I carried my cushion with me, when I went to make visits, or sat down to work at my door, and chatted with passers-by. This made me the better support the emptiness of babbling, and enabled me to pass my time with my female neighbors without weariness. Several of these were very amiable and not devoid of wit. One in particular, Isabella d'Ivernois, daughter of the attorney-general of Neuchatel, I found so estimable as to induce ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... poured forth, and thought of the laughter he had provoked as so much deserved rebuke; and he determined never to utter another word that should provoke a smile. He would feed and sleep, and grow stupid and stolid, heavy and dull, and bring forth emptiness and nothings with solemn effort and ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... the senses as the reticent syllables of that first gospel, spelt out from its original sentences, must have gripped the hearts of those who heard it first. The Latin phrases of a long drawn litany, set to complicated tunes, rolled overhead with an emptiness of barren sound, among the clouds of incense and the glitter of the painted walls and all the service of ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... declined to go, upon the ground that the laws were still Austrian and the judge a Magyar. He disapproved of such tolerance, he disapproved of the Croats because they declined to recognize that the Serbs had more merit than they, and as for Yugoslavia—it was a thing of emptiness—he laughed at it and called it Yugovina, the south wind. The only chance of life it had was if you left the whole affair to the Serbs and then in two years it would be a solid thing. It may be thought ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... genuine man differs from them in this especially, that he makes love in some way a noble art, and, admiring it, knows all its divine value, makes it present in his mind, thus satisfying not his body merely, but his soul. More than once, when I think here of the emptiness, the uncertainty, the dreariness of life, it occurs to me that perhaps thou hast chosen better, and that not Caesar's court, but war and love, are the only objects for which it is worth while to be born and ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... shall I define Thy shapeless, baseless, placeless emptiness? Nor form, nor colour, sound, nor size is thine, Nor words nor fingers can thy voice express; But though we cannot thee to aught compare, A thousand things to thee may likened be, And though thou art with nobody nowhere, Yet half mankind devote themselves to thee. How many books ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... marionettes exchange with each other off-stage; or even the poet's impudent borrowings from Homer, Theocritus, Ennius and Lucretius; the plain theft, revealed to us by Macrobius, of the second song of the Aeneid, copied almost word for word from one of Pisander's poems; in fine, all the unutterable emptiness of this heap of verses. The thing he could not forgive, however, and which infuriated him most, was the workmanship of the hexameters, beating like empty tin cans and extending their syllabic quantities measured according to the unchanging rule of a pedantic and dull prosody. He disliked ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... my friend)—Ver. 886. The emptiness of his poor attempts to be familiar are very evident ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... great scale, but for a good deal 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 ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... notebook crushed up to her, Lilly's voice rang out like the crack of a whip, springing them apart. There were a whiteness and a sense of emptiness upon her and she wanted to crumple up rather sickly and cry, as if the blows had ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... scenes of adventure through which I had passed, and refusing to compose themselves to rest. With the dawn I was up and on deck. As I stepped upon the poop and looked around upon the quiet harbour where the ships rode at anchor, I became aware of a certain emptiness in the bay. I rubbed my eyes and looked again. The Spanish ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... think it wild? 'Tis true, my mother was a poetess. But I will convince my son as I am convincing the world-tut, tut! To avoid swelling talk, I tell you, Richie, I have my hand on the world's wheel, and now is the time for you to spring from it and gain your altitude. If you fail, my success is emptiness.' ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the weight of centuries, he leans Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, The emptiness of ages in his face, And on his back ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... is well that all our treasures should be in one place. It is better that they should all be in One Person. And if only we will lay our poor emptiness by the side of His fulness there will pass over from that infinite abundance and sufficiency everything that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... foresheet. They heard the anchor-watch snoring on a lighthouse-tug, nosed into a pocket of darkness where a lantern glimmered on either side; somebody waked with a grunt, threw them a rope, and they made fast to a silent wharf flanked with great iron-roofed sheds fall of warm emptiness, and ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... punishment in hell—eternal toil and recoil (the modern idol 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; ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... regeneration of our era. A whole generation has learned the luxury of thinking heroic thoughts and being conversant with heroic deeds, and I have faith to believe that all this is not to go out in a mere crush of fashionable luxury and folly and frivolous emptiness,—but that our girls are going to merit the high praise given us by De Tocqueville, when he placed first among the causes of our prosperity the noble character of American women. Because foolish female persons in New York are striving to outdo the demi-monde of Paris ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... went by Malling, and was lost in the lighted emptiness of the High Street. Malling did not follow it. Now he had a great desire, born out of his inmost humanity, to speak with Henry Chichester. He made up his mind to return to the curate's door: if he saw a light to ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... by none, but its defects or dangers are at points where Greek is strong. Greek simplicity recalls us to the central interests of the human heart. Greek truthfulness is a challenge to see the world as it is and shun the emptiness of mere music, the falsities of rhetoric or sentiment, the incompleteness of writers who, instead of seeing life as a whole, ignore or emphasize a part of it as their own sympathies dictate. Greek beauty is a memorial of an aspect of the universe ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... it will tolerate nothing but what is absolute and full." ... It is no use grumbling about the Latin. The nature of great disasters calls out for that foundational tongue. They roll as it were (do the great disasters of our time) right down the emptiness of the centuries until they strike the walls of Rome and provoke these sonorous echoes worthy of ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... was our forlorn hope, but it only created a passing comfort, which soon went off leaving our bodies more chill and dejected than before. My head swam with feverish emptiness. I seemed suddenly possessed by a feeling of wild independence—seeing nothing, fearing nothing. Presently, this died away, and I fell back ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... much that is as big in spirit as in handling. The work is frequently Mendelssohnian in treatment. An archaism that might have been spared, since so little of the poem was retained, is the sad old Haendelian style of repeating the same words indefinitely, to all neglect of emptiness of meaning and triteness. Thus the words "Pars mea, Rex meus" are repeated by the alto exactly thirteen times! which, any one will admit, is an unlucky number, especially since the other voices keep tossing the same unlucky ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... query from a worthy farmer, "to what cause he attributed the present depressed state of agriculture?" Cobden unhesitatingly replied, "to over-production." Cross-questioning of this kind would speedily prove the emptiness ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... snowshoes at the border of the village he entered the main street, which ran straight through town to the lake front. No one was in sight on the broad thoroughfare and he found a measure of relief in its emptiness, for though he did not adhere to the rigid New England doctrine that governed his neighbors, he found no pleasure in wanton violation of their stiff code. Realizing that with snowshoes, gun and fox he jarred heavily upon ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... this crucial instant that Becky Bollingbroke had put her awful question: "Have you made up your mind, Fanny, what you are going to do?" That was twelve years ago, but deep down in some secret cave of Fanny's being the ghastly echo of the words still reverberated through the emptiness and ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... remark. I am, indeed, fortunate above my deserts, so fortunate that I feel afraid. When I turn and see my beloved wife sitting at my side, I feel afraid lest I should after all be dreaming a dream, and awake to find nothing but emptiness. And then, on the other hand, is this colossal wealth, which has come to me through her, and there again I feel afraid. But, please Heaven, I hope with her help to do some good with it, and remembering always that it is a great trust that ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... seemed to him like a wonder of Nature. The water of the river had indeed been running out, as the Indian said; and there before him lay the channel, running low, with its waters still pouring forward at a rate which seemed to threaten final emptiness. And as he looked, the waters fell lower and lower, until at length, after he had been there three hours, the ...
— The Lily and the Cross - A Tale of Acadia • James De Mille
... colored, of bright song. He loved to see her move here and there, with movements as of music. And she was like a child at times, as she solemnly made sherbets—very like a child she was, intense, simple. And she was like a young relative; there was emptiness in the house as she went, and when she came back it was ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... it is said in fulfilment of a vow made, as was Galla Placidia's, in a storm at sea. It is this church which in great part we still see, with additions of the thirteenth century, a lonely and beautiful thing in the emptiness of the sodden fields to the south-east of Ravenna between the Canale del ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... neighbors. "Blythe's coming to have the front room next as soon as Cross Eyes can pink-wash it—" Her eyes glimpsed the box, she fairly ran for it, "That's Maman's," she exclaimed, "How did you find it?" She hugged it delightedly; she opened it—"Even its emptiness smells nice," she sighed. ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... 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 ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... interests, the sufferer falls a victim to a kind of nostalgia; he regrets the many sights to be seen for nothing in Paris. The isolation, the darkened days, the suffering that affects the mind and spirits even more than the body, the emptiness of the life,—all these things tend to induce him to cling to the human being who waits on him as a drowned man clings to a plank; and this especially if the bachelor patient's character is as weak as his ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... of which the majority of well-born children are deprived, and deprived of many comforts by which lowly-born children are surrounded. I was happiest when I was too young to distinguish between pleasure and pain, and, as it were to provide for the emptiness of much of my after life, destiny willed that my memory should be the strongest and most comforting faculty of ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... parting would be. It is not the parting alone, but it is the horror of the grave,—the tender child alone in the far off gloomy burial-ground, the heavy earth piled on the tender little breast, the helplessness that looked to you for protection which you could not give, and the emptiness of the home to which you return when the child is gone. He who made a mother's heart and they who have borne it, alone can tell the unutterable pain of all this. The little child is so carefully and tenderly watched over and cherished while it is ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... lift your natures up: Embrace our aims: work out your freedom. Girls, Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed; Drink deep until the habits of the slave, The sins of emptiness, gossip and spite And ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 3. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... family! I am one of them—my uncle Job Bucket is another. We, the Buckets, are atoms of creation; yet we, the Buckets, are living types of the immensity of the world's inhabitants. We illustrate their ups and downs—their fulness and their emptiness—their risings and their falling—and all the several goods and ills, the world's denizens in general, and Buckets in particular, are undoubted ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... came sweeping across me, what miserable friendlessness and loneliness are here revealed! His poverty is great; but his solitude, how horrible! Think of it. Of a Sunday, Wall-street is deserted as Petra; and every night of every day it is an emptiness. This building, too, which of week-days hums with industry and life, at nightfall echoes with sheer vacancy, and all through Sunday is forlorn. And here Bartleby makes his home; sole spectator, of a solitude which he has seen all populous—a ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... on this last evening, preferring to bring their news rather than give it by telephone; and found, instead of the usual cheery tea-party in the hall, only silence and emptiness. Allenby, appearing, broke into a broad smile of pleasure ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... 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 any ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... it a sense of blankness descended on her. She had succeeded in driving from her mind all vain hesitations, doubts, returns upon herself: her healthy system naturally rejected them. But they left a queer emptiness in which her thoughts rattled about as thoughts might, she supposed, in the first moments after death—before one got used to it. To get used to being dead: that seemed to be her immediate business. And she felt such a novice at it—felt so ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... his awkward, crawling progress up the ladder into the conning tower just above, Keith helping from behind. When they stood before the exit port on the lee side, Wells shot back its bolts and the door swung open, revealing the black emptiness of the water chamber. The commander gazed for a second into Bowman's eyes. ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... eyes saw freedom and love, her heart was very warm with gratitude to this man who was helping her. But she could not guess, how could she, how in spite of the laughter on his lips there was a great ache and a feeling of emptiness ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... is not here. She partakes in none of my joys, and bears with me none of my sorrows. I do not murmur; I only feel daily, constantly, and with deepening impression, how much I have had for which to be thankful, and how much I have lost.... The whole year after her death was a year of great emptiness, as if there was not motive enough in the world to move me. I used to pray earnestly to God either to take me away, or to restore to me that interest in things and susceptibility to motive ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... the South would gladly liberate her slaves, if she saw any prospect of bettering the condition of the objects of her tender and solicitous benevolence. I trust, too, that this admission will go far to prove the emptiness of your declaration, that the abolitionists "have thrown back for half a century the prospect of any species of emancipation of the African race, gradual or immediate, in any of the states," and the emptiness of your declaration, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... placed the hand-bag on the table, and opened it. I felt among the things at the top of it, but failed to touch the cigar-case. I shoved my hand in deeper, and stirred the things about, but still I did not reach it. A cold wave swept down my spine, and a sort of emptiness came to the pit of my stomach. Then I turned red-hot, and the sweat sprung out all over me. I wet my lips with my tongue, and said to myself, 'Don't be an ass. Pull yourself together, pull yourself together. Take the things out, one at a time. It's there, of course, it's there. Don't ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... mad with terror in case I said the wrong thing, I felt for a moment that the whole Wilcox family was a fraud, just a wall of newspapers and motor-cars and golf-clubs, and that if it fell I should find nothing behind it but panic and emptiness. " ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... proceed—the study of the causal conditions of the crime. For the causal law does not say that everything which occurs, taken as a whole and in its elements, has one ground—that would be simply categorical emptiness. What is really required is an efficient and satisfying cause. And this is required not merely for the deed as a whole but for every single detail. When causes are found for all of these they must be brought together and correlated ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... to the big lamp and turned up the wick. At once a clear light flooded every nook of the big room and showed all its emptiness. ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... that first published this last and alarming theft. Annatoo being at the helm at dawn, he had gone to relieve her; and looking to see how we headed, was horror-struck at the emptiness of the binnacle. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... on one long leg in the door of his drug-store, oil on his fluffy brown hair. He was melancholy and downcast, plainly resentful in his bearing toward Morgan as the contriver of this business stagnation. He swept his hand around the emptiness of the town as Morgan drew near, giving voice to ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... get the impression made on a fresh young mind. But so many are 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
... space, in the square and in the ellipse between the colonnades and on the steps, two hundred thousand men could be drawn up in rank and file, horse and foot and guns. Excepting it be on some special occasion, there are rarely more than two or three hundred persons in sight. The paved emptiness makes one draw a breath of surprise, and human eyes seem too small to take in all the flatness below, all the breadth before, and all the height above. Taken together, the picture is too big for convenient sight. The impression itself moves unwieldily in the ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... in life more irksome than that of an editor who is obliged to find amusement for his Readers, from a head which is too often (as is the present predicament with our own) filled with emptiness. Since commencing this paper, we have received no communication of any kind, so that the whole weight of the business devolves upon our own shoulders, a load far too great for them to bear. We hope the Public will reflect ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... she sees in him again the Savior whom she had once laughed at. She tells him with heartrending truth her inextinguishable suffering, her eternal sorrow, her lamentation full of the laughter of derision, the whole wide emptiness of her misery, and implores him to be merciful, and let her weep for a single hour upon his pure bosom—for a single hour to be his. But the answer comes like the voice of an avenging God, terribly ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... 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, ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... symptom is a dragging sensation in the back when the child is in the act of sucking, and an exhausted feeling of sinking and emptiness at the pit of the stomach afterwards. This is soon followed by loss of appetite, costive bowels, and pain on the left side; then, the head will be more or less affected, sometimes with much throbbing, singing in the ears, ...
— The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease. • Thomas Bull, M.D.
... bloomed alone, her last tears will have fallen upon her own bosom, her last sob will have rent the air, and the beautiful earth will be dead for ever, borne on in the sweep of the race that will never end, borne along yet a few ages, till her sweet body turns to star-dust in the great emptiness of ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... greatest efforts of poetry, painting, and music; and when you have collected your audience, just at the moment when their minds are erect with expectation, let it be reported that a state criminal of high rank is on the point of being executed in the adjoining square; in a moment the emptiness of the theatre would demonstrate the comparative weakness of the imitative arts, and proclaim the triumph of the real sympathy. I believe that this notion of our having a simple pain in the reality, yet a delight in the representation, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... wilderness and nature had been generous, the colonists thought. There were fruits, abundant timber, deer and other animals for food, and a not too numerous native population. The hot, humid weather of midsummer and the snow, ice, and emptiness of winter were not in evidence. The choice of a site for settlement was both good and bad. The anchorage for ships at Jamestown was good. The Island had not then become a true island and had an easily ...
— The First Seventeen Years: Virginia 1607-1624 • Charles E. Hatch
... 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 made ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... choir the canons sang for themselves only in the emptiness of the church; the shutting of the iron gates of the screen, opened to admit some late-coming priest, echoed like explosions throughout the building, and above the choir the organ joined in at times between the plain song, but it sounded lazily, timidly, as though from ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... followed. He penetrated alone into an empty house of silence, and all around him the emptiness moved and ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... homestead, and the wide halls and great rooms of the rambling country house rang with the voices of children. Three of these little ones slipped back to Heaven before the portals had closed. The stricken parents with blinded eyes met only the rayless emptiness of unbelief. May God help the mother, fainting beneath a bereavement greater than she can bear, who cries for help and finds none; who stretches her empty arms upward in an agony of appeal and is answered by the hollow echo of her ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Consul, who sometimes found the investigation a little more searching than he liked. I flatter myself, however, that, by much practice, I attained considerable skill in this kind of intercourse, the art of which lies in passing off commonplaces for new and valuable truths, and talking trash and emptiness in such a way that a pretty acute auditor might mistake it for something solid. If there be any better method of dealing with such junctures,—when talk is to be created out of nothing, and within the scope of several minds at once, so that you cannot apply yourself to your ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... resolution not even to write to Barbara, Wilmot was weakening pitiably. He wished that he had taken her at her word and married her Monday when she was in the mood. Better Barbara unloving, he thought, than this terrible emptiness and aching. His heart was proving stronger than his mind. Short, more or less conventional phrases were torn from him. Barbara, her heart beating faster and faster, ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... day he wandered up to the rooms which had been Evadne's. They were kept very much as she was accustomed to have them, but there was that something of bareness about them, and a kind of spick-and-spanness conveying a sense of emptiness and desertion which strikes cold to the heart when it comes of the absence of someone dear. And Mr. Frayling felt the discomfort of it. The afternoon sunlight slanted across the little sitting room, falling on ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... his book and rebuttoning his tunic the policeman lingered on the corner for a moment in the manner of one who has nothing to do and no place to go. He was preparing to saunter on when footfalls began to echo in the emptiness of the street and presently the figure of a young man grew out of the gray vapor—a young man who was swinging down towards the docks with the easy stride of an athlete. As he came within the restricted range of the arc light it was to be seen that his panama hat was tilted to the back of his ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... bell handle. A jangling peal rang discordantly, echoing through the emptiness within. No one came. They rang again and again—but there was no sign of life. Then they walked completely round the house. Everywhere silence, and shuttered windows. If they could believe the evidence of their eyes ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... 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 was God Himself, I widely ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... our Father's house: wherefore he has appointed that grace shall be provided for us, to supply at such a place, such a state or temptation, as need requires. But withal, as my lord expeeteth his son should acquaint him with the present emptiness of his purse and with the difficulty he hath now to grapple with; so God our Father expects that we should plead by Christ our need at the throne of grace, in order to a supply of grace. "Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... like the silence before the dawn. Oppressive, too, was the sense of emptiness. Two men in this chamber; one small watcher beyond the door; otherwise emptiness, sensed through all the two hundred rooms of the deserted pile. Life died from the world. People forgot. Stillness, death, loneliness, and ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... this, he could not speak for grief, and fell down on the floor, whether it were from the sorrow that arose upon what Samuel had said, or from his emptiness, for he had taken no food the foregoing day nor night, he easily fell quite down: and when with difficulty he had recovered himself, the woman would force him to eat, begging this of him as a favor on account of her concern in that dangerous instance of fortune-telling, which ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... 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 he wished she hadn't gone ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... responded, gruffly. "HALL has the oratorical manner of a street-preacher, and the emptiness of a tankard that a thirsty porter has held to his lips for sixty seconds. Like a skilfully-drawn glass of his own four-half, he's mostly froth; only, after all, there's something under the froth in the glass of 'HALL's Hextra,' ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 21, 1891 • Various
... in the heat, with the locust drowsily shrilling; warm and silver nights, made musical by the loves of many mocking-birds; the waste places green tangles of blossoming weed, the roads a-flutter with hovering yellow butterflies, over all the land a brooding hush, not the silence of idleness, of emptiness, but of life, intense and still as a spinning top is still. Beneath it those who listen are aware of a faint, constant stirring, a whisper of green and eager things pushing themselves up ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... stood poised. Beneath us, here at the brink were millions upon millions of miles of emptiness, the remote, unfathomable void. Blazing worlds down there ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... the fog-buoy's squattering flight Guides us through the haggard night; When the warning bugle blows; When the lettered doorways close; When our brittle townships press, Impotent, on emptiness. ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... directs, subdues and uses matter; and in prayer we have already seen that we place ourselves in communication with the Central Force of the universe, acquiring power we should not otherwise possess, and replenishing our emptiness from an inexhaustible store. But if thought, mind, will, are that which lies behind all physical accomplishment, from the simplest to the most wonderful; and if by an exercise of the same faculty we may actually secure results of a spiritual order, direct answering messages, from God: why should ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... sweep from their course to renew their energy from straggling suns that seemed to be farther and farther apart. The first was a tiny blue sun that burned its way through the emptiness. The second was a huge nebula that pulsed and spouted flame and protean worlds into space—enveloped them again as it breathed, scared them, and cast them out once more. And Odin wondered if in such a furnace and such torment his own ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... bed, the cabin was stripped almost bare. Amid its emptiness of dismantled shelves and walls and floor, only the tiny ancestress still hung in her place, last token of the home that had been. This miniature, tacked against the despoiled boards, and its descendant, the angry girl with her hand on an open box-lid, made a sort of couple ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... insane, avoided as cynical, or 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 ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... Bill understands us," cheerfully interposed the Governor. His keen eyes had noted Mr. Bill's alarm as they noted the emptiness of Miss Pussy's cup. "By the way, Julia," he went on with a change of the subject, "Major Lightfoot found Betty in the road and brought her home. The ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... Soddle—and of power as a concrete argument. The incident being the removal of a half-sucked tin soldier from his hand by the subtle device of striking his knuckles sharply with the fire tongs. Then and always the boy insisted that this method of reprimand justified his apparent submission; the emptiness of his hand and the smarting of his knuckles indubitably marking probably the only occasion in his life when all his strategical points abruptly turned inward. Contrary to the suppositions of impartial psychologists, ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... where the grandfather used to sit, offering his wrinkled hands to the kisses of chubby children. Poor moderns, always moving or remodeling! We who from transforming our cities, our houses, our customs and creeds, have no longer where to lay our heads, let us not add to the pathos and emptiness of our changeful existence by abandoning the life of the home. Let us light again the flame put out on our hearths, make sanctuaries for ourselves, warm nests where the children may grow into men, where love may find privacy, old age repose, ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... hath shone Amid the jewels of my throne, Halo of Hell! and with a pain Not Hell shall make me fear again— O! craving heart, for the lost flowers And sunshine of my summer hours! Th' undying voice of that dead time, With its interminable chime, Rings, in the spirit of a spell, Upon thy emptiness—a knell. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... insisted, at the risk of seeming repetitious, on the need of considering the audience whose minds are to be won over; for what persuasiveness can mean apart from specific persons to persuade I cannot conceive. Much of the perfunctory emptiness of the textbooks when they get to this part of the subject comes from neglecting this very practical and obvious side of making an argument. The difficulty it raises for arguments written in class work is just as obvious; more than most kinds of composition written for practice, ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... occupy inferior posts in Government offices or in business houses. The girls are almost always pretty, ignorant of the world, kind and agreeable and generally bilingual; they prattle innocently both in French and English. The emptiness ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... would call more specifically dramatic than the Screen Scene in The School for Scandal; yet it would be the veriest quibbling to argue that any appreciable part of its effect arises from the clash of will against will. This whole comedy, indeed, suffices to show the emptiness of the theory. With a little strain it is possible to bring it within the letter of the formula; but who can pretend that any considerable part of the attraction or interest of the play is due ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... imagined the desert to be of vast emptiness, and what she found it to be of teeming life, was like the difference between a gold-bright autumn leaf seen by the naked eye, and the same leaf ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... a clear heaven solemn and severe with stars, comprehend (as the great achievement of our race permits us now to do) what an emptiness and what a scale are there, and you will easily discover in that one glance, or you will feel at least the appalling thing which tempts men to deny ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... slowly weaned. Sick at heart, Solomon in his old age, wrote the saddest book in the Bible; and though his first writing, the Canticles, had been a joyful prophetic song of the love between the Lord and His Church, his last was a mournful lamentation over the vanity and emptiness of the world, and full of scorn of all that ...
— The Chosen People - A Compendium Of Sacred And Church History For School-Children • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... of life. It had rained the night before, and the mild sun was still veiled by clouds. From the plane trees came the morning carols of the birds, while far away in the sleeping country a locomotive whistled with a prolonged moan. And he was alone; alone in the great melancholy house, whose emptiness he felt around him, whose silence he heard. The light slowly increased, and he watched the patches it made on the window-panes broadening and brightening. Then the candle paled in the growing light, and the whole room became ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... waiter's eye upon him. (Should he ask for credit? They might be frightfully disagreeable in such a cockney resort as this.) "Tut, tut," said Mr. Brumley, and then—a little late for it—resorted to and discovered the emptiness of his sovereign purse. He realized that this was out of the picture at this stage, felt his ears and nose and cheeks grow hot and pink. The waiter's colleague across the room became ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... singularities appeared to be summed up in his refusal to take his place in the life-sized family group (tres distingue et tres soigne remarks a modern critic of the work) painted about this time. His mother expostulated with him on the matter:—she must needs feel, a little icily, the emptiness of hope, and something more than the due measure of cold in things for a woman of her age, in the presence of a son who desired but to fade out of the world like a breath—and she suggested filial duty. "Good mother," he answered, ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... pitiless in my criticism of the economists: for them I confess that, in general, I have no liking. The arrogance and the emptiness of their writings, their impertinent pride and their unwarranted blunders, have disgusted me. Whoever, knowing them, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... appetite failed him, a cough came on, and a hectic flush in the pale little face. The child was pining for a change of air, and the father's and mother's purse had been already drained almost to emptiness by the expenses of the first illness. One day when Doctor Watson came and felt the feeble, too rapid pulse he looked grave. Mrs. Home followed him from ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade
... I felt better; also I saw that there was a personal impatience in my case that was not worthy of one who undertook to awaken the young. I introduced The Valley-Road Girl to Addison's "Sir Roger." There is an emptiness to me about Addison which I am not sure but partakes of a bit of prejudice, since I am primarily imbued with the principle that a writer must be a man before he is fit to be read. If I could read Addison now for the first time, I should know. The Valley-Road Girl's ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... operas, it stands in its dignified simplicity like the Parthenon beside the bewildering beauty of a Gothic cathedral; and its truth and grandeur are perhaps the more conspicuous because allied to one of those classic stories which even in Gluck's time had become almost synonymous with emptiness ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... her fingers. Well, this was the end. She was to be thrust out of the new brightness, back into the drab dreariness, the emptiness that was her ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... oppressive height. Whether it had been forced up by special machinations, such as Clodius imputed sometimes to Pompeius, sometimes to Cicero, and these in their turn charged on Clodius, cannot be determined; the continuance of piracy, the emptiness of the public chest, and the negligent and disorderly supervision of the supplies of corn by the government were already quite sufficient of themselves, even without political forestalling, to produce scarcities of bread in a great city ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... before them a dark ocean reached out in forbidding emptiness to a darker horizon. Ahead, the only broken line in the vast level expanse was a mountain rising abruptly from the sea. It was a volcanic cone surmounting an island; the sunlight's glow reflected from behind them against the sombre mass that lifted toward the clouds. Their ship was high ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... mentioned without reverence; not only because Burke was incomparably the greatest of all English political writers, and a standing refutation of the theory which couples rhetorical excellence with intellectual emptiness, but also because he was a man whose glowing hatred of all injustice and sympathy for all suffering never evaporated in empty words. His fine literary perception enabled him to detect the genuine excellence which underlay the superficial triviality of Crabbe's verses. ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... 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
... his loneliness; and together they crossed some hills. Why, there be my camels, as I'm alive! the camel-driver cried. Joseph had brought him luck, for in a valley close at hand the camels were found, staring into emptiness. Strange abstractions! Joseph said to himself, and then to the camel-driver: since I have found your camels, who knows but that you may tell me of one Jesus, an Essene from the cenoby on the eastern bank ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... I; 'but there is a much more serious problem confronting you and me just at present, and that is a certain sickening emptiness which makes one weak and giddy. My few coppers stood between us and—and—well, serious thoughts of the future. I have never begged nor stolen, ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... from a dream of emptiness and loneliness in a darkened desert. The moon had set and false dawn was burning on the far horizon. He shook his head blearily. ...
— The Egyptian Cat Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... things, we know, are neither rich nor rare, But wonder how the devil they got there. Were others angry: I excused them too; Well might they rage, I gave them but their due. A man's true merit 'tis not hard to find; But each man's secret standard in his mind,— That casting-weight pride adds to emptiness,— This, who can gratify? for who can guess? The bard whom pilfered Pastorals renown, Who turns a Persian tale for half a crown, Just writes to make his barrenness appear, And strains, from hard-bound brains, eight lines a year; He, who still wanting, though he lives on theft, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... queer emptiness in his chest caused him long and perplexing speculation. There were shouting voices aloft, and a gleaming black wall slowly took form above him. He made out the pointed heads ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... solid basis than merely that of having written the most readable and tender of humorous romances. He reformed literature. He tilted at windmills as truly as ever his hero did, and overthrew the false taste for wordy pomp and emptiness which was characteristic of his times. It was not only Spanish literature that felt the impulse of his warm, frank honesty and insight into life. All ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... herself enfolded in the hills. So sure she was that she had been wedded, she glanced swiftly up and down the street, lest one chance passenger should have seen her naked soul. So a young girl, kissed by her lover, will search the emptiness in fear. Not a soul could be seen; Charles Street under its lamplight showed like a broad white ribbon curving towards the Square, towards the Park. To her heart she whispered, "Dearest, you may love me—we are alone under the stars"— and then shut her eyes fast, ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... diction I have often lopped, his triumphant exultations over Pope and Rowe I have sometimes suppressed, and his contemptible ostentation I have frequently concealed; but I have in some places shewn him, as he would have shewn himself, for the reader's diversion, that the inflated emptiness of some notes may justify or excuse the ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... 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 ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... for all the Roman parents, rounds of beef, tyrannical uncles and cold hams in England. Tempt me no more, Jerry; Bo'sun, avaunt, and leave me to melancholy and emptiness." ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... or preservation of his fair fame and his earthly state, and perchance his life, he is in my hands. Nor do I—whom the scarlet letter has disciplined to truth, though it be the truth of red-hot iron entering into the soul—nor do I perceive such advantage in his living any longer a life of ghastly emptiness, that I shall stoop to implore thy mercy. Do with him as thou wilt! There is no good for him, no good for me, no good for thee. There is no good for little Pearl. There is no path to guide us ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... see an oak counter from some bankrupt wine merchant's sale, and a tallow dip, never snuffed for fear it should burn too quickly, making darkness visible. By that anomalous light you descry rows of empty shelves with some difficulty. An urchin in a blue blouse mounts guard over the emptiness, and blows his fingers, and shuffles his feet, and slaps his chest, like a cabman on the box. Just look about you! there are no more books there than I have here. Nobody could guess what kind ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... let them not slip from thy hands. Be gracious, Accessible to foreigners, accept Their service trustfully. Preserve with strictness The Church's discipline. Be taciturn; The royal voice must never lose itself Upon the air in emptiness, but like A sacred bell must sound but to announce Some great disaster or great festival. Dear son, thou art approaching to those years When woman's beauty agitates our blood. Preserve, preserve the sacred purity Of innocence and proud shamefacedness; He, who through passion ...
— Boris Godunov - A Drama in Verse • Alexander Pushkin
... Marats lurched up to Leroy, and ran their hands over him, turning out his pockets, and cursing him foully for their emptiness. He saw the same office performed upon others, and saw them stripped of money, pocket-books, watches, rings, buckles, and whatever else of value they happened to possess. One man, a priest, was even deprived of his shoes by a ruffian who was in ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... not we read him, we can feel From time to time the vigor of his name Against us like a finger for the shame And emptiness of what our souls reveal In books that are as altars where we kneel To consecrate the flicker, not ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... Covenanting zeal and godliness; and now that at last I have shaken the dust of your beggarly Scotland from my heels, you—the veriest milksop that ever ran tottering from its mother's lap would chide me because, yon bottle being done, I sing to keep me from waxing sad in the contemplation of its emptiness!" ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... 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
... intensely disliked it. He was, as he said, a lover of men; the worship of nature drained and exhausted the sympathies, the wills and the spirits of men. The passages in which Klingsor himself, in his moments of despair, and Merlin expose the emptiness of this philosophy, are among the best philosophic statements of the play. They are, how ever, too exhaustive. But they are good philosophy, if they are bad drama and poetry. Klingsor ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... that I should see all sorts of strange and weird-looking objects if I ever happened to penetrate to the interior of a Kafir witch doctor's hut. The owner seemed to read my disappointment in my eyes, for he laughed softly as he waved his hand, indicating the emptiness ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... the emptiness of existence, the unworthiness of men, the dreary future that awaited her—though this did not trouble her greatly, as she confidently expected to die soon—and many other such dolorous topics, Miss Hugonin decided to retire for the night. She rose, filled with speculations as to the paltriness ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... there is also an overwhelming conviction of the transitory character of the external world, and the emptiness of all man-bestowed ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... Bible—connected in the mind of the mistress of the room with the intensest moments of the spiritual life. There was a strip of carpet by the bed, a plain chair or two, a large press; otherwise no furniture that was not absolutely necessary, and no ornaments. And yet, for all its emptiness, the little room in its order and spotlessness had the look and spell of ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... this barn, having followed a path which led to the lower story, she looked in at an open door, and received the impression of vast extent, emptiness, and the scent of hay. She entered, looking about from side to side. At the opposite end of the great room, was an open door through which the sun shone, and as she approached it, she heard a voice and ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... last curtsy for the night behind the foot-lights, has thrown off her tawdry frippery, and sits in her lonely chamber, glowering at the image of the young rival who has won all the applause,—when she bemoans her waning charms and the wearisome life which has lost its sparkle, and sees its emptiness and hollowness,—does she not look wistfully at that little flame which flickers on her hollowing cheek, from which the stage-blush has been washed, and think the game a losing one? The Senator lives near by, and that is Madame's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... a symbol of their early aspirations dawning freshly from the dimness of their past. More than one old man thought again of some little maid whose love made his boyish days a pleasant memory to him now. More than one smiling fop felt the emptiness of his smooth speech, when the truthful eyes looked up into his own; and more than one pale woman sighed regretfully within herself, "I, too, was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... at all this; then he shivered a little; he did not understand the emptiness and silence; and he was suffering with the ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... 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 ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... quoted from Marmontel, how the high nobility on these occasions treated the learned, and how the learned demeaned themselves toward the nobility. It appears, therefore, that Rousseau was not in error when he alleged that emptiness and wantonness only were cherished in these societies, and that the literature which was then current ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... 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
... 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, ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... was left alone in a room like a vivid cell, all emptiness and electric light, and with another green door leading into a farther room, he became aware of a very faint sound that came from the other side of the door. It was like the bark of a dog shut up in a distant cellar; it explained the padding of ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... remarkable in their profession, Marzio was very vain of his intellectual superiority in other branches. It may be a question whether vanity is not essential to any one who is forced to compete in excellence with other gifted men. Vanity means emptiness, and in the case of the artist it means that emptiness which craves to be filled with praise. The artist may doubt his own work, but he is bitterly disappointed if other people doubt it also. Marzio had his full share ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... red eyes and swollen faces bespoke plainly enough the bereavement they had just suffered. Silent, indifferent to everything and everybody, their hands spread out on their knees, they stared into the ghastly emptiness, vainly seeking consolation for their shattered dream, ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... number of these failed, some leaving quietly and deliberately, others rushing away in unceremonial haste. Chester was quite alone on his side of the table. If there had been a trifle of "sinking emptiness" in him before, the meal braced him up wonderfully. In this he thought he had discovered a sure cure for sea-sickness. One day later he imparted this information to a lady voyager, who received it with the exclamation, ...
— Story of Chester Lawrence • Nephi Anderson
... 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
... listened, trembling as he listened, till the gentle echoes of the music died upon the quiet air. They died, and were gathered into the emptiness which receives and records ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... of mind are both Americans: Washington Irving, in two essays in The Sketch-Book, 'The Art of Bookmaking' and 'The Mutability of Literature'; and Nathaniel Hawthorne, in many places, but notably in that famous chapter on 'The Emptiness of Picture Galleries,' ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... my education were false, if the eyes of the sea forgot their secret, or if the accent of the steep woods became vulgar, if the fairy adventures that happen in my heart fell flat, if the good friends my eyes have never seen failed me,—then indeed should I know emptiness, and an astonishment ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... hazarded in regard to me. Society opened its arms to me as a returning prodigal, and my revulsion of feeling was all the more spontaneous from the fact, that, if some of my former acquaintances were as frivolous as ever, they had learned to conceal their emptiness by an adaptability which made them agreeable companions. There was a keen satisfaction, too, in the consciousness which became mine, as I went from house to house during the following weeks, that I excelled the most of them in the power to make myself agreeable. The reading and study of the past ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... tightly gripping the ledge and shrinking with a shuddering instinctive fear. Then suddenly the thunders seemed to stifle all memory of sound—and left only the silent universe with myself and this terribly beautiful thing in the midst of utter emptiness. And I loved it with a strange, desperate, tigerish love. It expressed itself so magnificently; and that is really all a man, or a waterfall, or a mountain, or a flower, or a grasshopper, or a meadow lark, ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... at his usual fast before Easter, Johnson recorded:—'I felt myself very much disordered by emptiness, and called for tea with peevish and impatient eagerness.' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... 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 to speculation ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... that his prophecies are true and right; that the heathenish prophets commit an unrighteousness by performing something else than that which they promised to perform. To declare righteousness is to declare that which is righteous, which does not conceal internal emptiness and rottenness under a fair outside. The words: "I the Lord speak righteousness, I declare rectitude," could not but have died on the lips of the "great unknown."—In chap. xlvi. 8-13 the apostates in Israel are addressed. They are exhorted ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... he had returned to his room those eyes still haunted him, nor could he banish the conviction that some time, somewhere, in that young life there had been an unfilled void which in some degree, however slight, corresponded to the blank emptiness of ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... pray also. Sometimes she wakened Lisa early at daybreak, dressed her hurriedly, and took her in secret to matins. Lisa followed her on tiptoe, almost holding her breath. The cold and twilight of the early morning, the freshness and emptiness of the church, the very secrecy of these unexpected expeditions, the cautious return home and to her little bed, all these mingled impressions of the forbidden, strange, and holy agitated the little ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... the streets, at this hour dim, deserted vistas, looking larger than they did by day. He stole along them feeling curiously small, dwarfed by their wide emptiness, wanting to hide from their observation. It was typical of what the rest of his life would be, shunning the light, footing it furtively through darkness, ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner |
