Quotations About / On: EMPTY

The Queen has lands and gold, Mother
The Queen has lands and gold,
While you are forced to your empty breast
A skeleton Babe to hold

I did never know so full a voice issue from so empty a heart.
But the saying is true: "The empty vessel makes the greatest
sound."

When a poor disconsolated drooping creature is terrified from all enjoyment,—prays without ceasing 'till his imagination is heated,—fasts and mortifies and mopes, till his body is in as bad a plight as his mind; is it a wonder, that the mechanical disturbances ... of an empty belly, interpreted by an empty head, should be mistook for [the] workings [of God].

To play is nothing but the imitative substitution of a pleasurable, superfluous and voluntary action for a serious, necessary, imperative and difficult one. At the cradle of play as well as of artistic activity there stood leisure, tedium entailed by increased spiritual mobility, a horror vacui, the need of letting forms no longer imprisoned move freely, of filling empty time with sequences of notes, empty space with sequences of form.

January, month of empty pockets!... Let us endure this evil month, anxious as a theatrical producer's forehead.

Do you remember how old Ford was always writing how Conrad suffered so when he wrote? How it was un metier de chien etc. Do you suffer when you write? I don't at all. Suffer like a bastard when don't write, or just before, and feel empty and fucked out afterwards. But never feel as good as while writing.

Fact I know; and Law I know; but what is this Necessity, save an empty shadow of my own mind's throwing?

The military and the clergy cause us much annoyance; the clergy and the military, they empty our wallets and rob our intelligence.

Yet, to the empty trapeze of your flesh,
O Magdalene, each comes back to die alone.
Then you, the burlesque of our lust—and faith,
Lug us back lifeward—bone by infant bone.

There's only one way for an individual to remain upright, not to fall to pieces, not to sink into the mire of self-oblivion ... or self-contempt. That's calmly to turn away from everything, to say, "Enough!" and, folding one's useless arms across one's empty breast, to retain the ultimate, the sole attainable virtue, the virtue of recognizing one's own insignificance.