Home > Topic > nothingness
41 " Just the perfect peace of nothingness. That's what I believed. "
― Shaun David Hutchinson
42 " Woman's fear of the female Self, of the experience of the numinous archetypal Feminine, becomes comprehensible when we get a glimpse - or even only a hint – of the profound otherness of female selfhood as contrasted to male selfhood. Precisely that element which, in his fear of the Feminine, the male experiences as the hole, abyss, void, and nothingness turns into something positive for the woman without, however, losing these same characteristics. Here the archetypal Feminine is experienced not as illusion and as maya but rather as unfathomable reality and as life in which above and below, spiritual and physical, are not pitted against each other; reality as eternity is creative and, at the same time, is grounded in primeval nothingness. Hence as daughter the woman experiences herself as belonging to the female spiritual figure Sophia, the highest wisdom, while at the same time she is actualizing her connection with the musty, sultry, bloody depths of swamp-mother Earth. However, in this sort of Self-discovery woman necessarily comes to see herself as different from what presents itself to men -as, for example, spirit and father, but often also as the patriarchal godhead and his ethics. The basic phenomenon - that the human being is born of woman and reared by her during the crucial developmental phases - is expressed in woman as a sense of connectedness with all living things, a sense not yet sufficiently realized, and one that men, and especially the patriarchal male, absolutely lack to the extent women have it.To experience herself as so fundamentally different from the dominant patriarchal values understandably fills the woman with fear until she arrives at that point in her own development where, through experience and love that binds the opposites, she can clearly see the totality of humanity as a unity of masculine and feminine aspects of the Self. "
― Erich Neumann , The Fear of the Feminine and Other Essays on Feminine Psychology
43 " He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The question brought with it a sadness, but it was a general sadness which (he thought) had little to do with himself or with his particular fate; he was not even sure that the question sprang from the most immediate and obvious causes, from what his own life had become. It came, he believed, from the accretion of his years, from the density of accident and circumstance, and from what he had come to understand of them. He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.-- John Williams, 'Stoner "
44 " Now she knew living was just a brief hiatus, a blip really, in the infinite line of nothingness that composed that shadowy realm of the unknown. It could stop at any time. "
― Nenia Campbell , Terrorscape (Horrorscape, #3)
45 " If it is nothingness that awaits us, let us make an injustice of it, let us fight against destiny, even without hope of victory. "
― Miguel de Unamuno
46 " I could write about how I feel when I sing, write and create something from heartbreak, sorrow, sadness or just simply nothingness. How nothingness can become the most beautiful, unexplainable feeling that makes you forget about gravity for an hour. "
― Charlotte Eriksson , Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps
47 " Nothingness...there in this placewhere nothingness takesbut for the glimmera steadfast shimmerall would be consumed... "
― Muse, , Enigmatic Evolution
48 " Tell me something, Mari—do you believe in reincarnation?” Mari shakes her head. “No, I don’t think so,” she says. “So you don’t think there’s a life to come?” “I haven’t thought much about it. But it seems to me there’s no reason to believe in a life after this one.” “So once you’re dead there’s just nothing?”“Basically.”“Well, I think there has to be something like reincarnation. Or maybe I should say I’m scared to think there isn’t. I can’t understand nothingness. I can’t understand it and I can’t imagine it.” “Nothingness means there’s absolutely nothing, so maybe there’s no need to understand it or imagine it.” “Yeah, but what if nothingness is not like that? What if it’s the kind of thing that demands that you understand it or imagine it? I mean, you don’t know what it’s like to die, Mari. Maybe a person really has to die to understand what it’s like.” “Well, yeah…,” says Mari. “I get so scared when I start thinking about this stuff,” Korogi says. “I can hardly breathe, and my whole body wants to shrink into a corner. It’s so much easier to just believe in reincarnation. You might be reborn as something awful, but at least you can imagine what you’d look like—a horse, say, or a snail. And even if it was something bad, you might be luckier next time. "
― Haruki Murakami , After Dark
49 " Mrs. Bulstrode's naïve way of conciliating piety and worldliness, the nothingness of this life and desirability of cut glass, the consciousness at once of filthy rags and the best damask... "
― George Eliot , Middlemarch
50 " Sleeping in the simple small cottage rather than hotels... and under the billion stars is one of the breathtaking experience... pause, breath, nothingness moment is what gives meaning to my busy existence, that life is felt in silence, in that moment when what you see before you can no longer be conveyed with words... "
― El Fuego
51 " I don't want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can't even see it, something that's drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead. "
― Margaret Atwood , Cat's Eye
52 " Drift me away along with the dust traveling to infinity.To another world where it feels more at home.To another world where I don’t feel alone.Trapped in the angst of my soul.Not being embraced as a whole.A state of nothingness creeps upon me.Disappearing in the darkness of the shadows.How it has clocked my life.Because that is the only place where I find peace.I call it nyctophilia.And what am I when the day turns into the night,listening to the nocturnal and the howling wind?My soul leaving my body,To be at rest.Tears strain down my cheeks,Enough for my lungs to fight for air in the peaks.The atmosphere seems to be held in place by a certain silence, waiting for a sign to move.Even the earth forgot its behoove.Taken over by this silence that I yet do not understand myself.It seems that things don’t have a meaning,At least not anymore.The demons and darkness have taken over.Making me believe that it knows better.These demons can’t be seen,But they’re far from imaginary.They live inside my mind.Their evilness prevails,About to end the fight.Then I stop and think:This is a melancholy I’ll fight one more night. "