Without a sense of place the work is often reduced to a cry of voices in empty rooms, a literature of the self, at its best poetic music; at its worst a thin gruel of the ego.
Because winning a gold medal had been a dream of mine since a young age, I needed to empty my mind during the preparation for the Olympics by telling myself that it would be OK not to win a gold medal.
The first version of The Beautiful Room Is Empty was the first mss. I’d ever submitted to New York editors.
Perhaps grief is not about empty, but full. The full breath of life that includes death. The completeness, the cycles, the depth, the richness, the process, the continuity and the treasure of the moment that is gone the second you are aware of it.
There are moments when the grief comes bubbling up. The first time I saw Chris’s chair empty, that was really hard. And it was hard when I started folding up some of his sweaters that I so imagine him wearing.
Life is full and overflowing with the new. But it is necessary to empty out the old to make room for the new to enter.
When you get frisked by the police at the age of 10, and they empty your schoolbag out in the street and kick your books around and calling you names because of where you live, you just get an anger towards everyone who is outside of your neighborhood.
What I love the most is getting on the ice and just popping in a fabulous CD and skating – all by myself, the rink completely empty, just me and the music.
At the center of President Obama’s strategy for dealing with the Islamic State is an empty space. It’s supposed be filled by a ‘Sunni ground force,’ but after more than a year of effort, it’s still not there. Unless this gap is filled, Obama’s plan won’t work.
Prayer opens the heart to God, and it is the means by which the soul, though empty, is filled by God.
People became more interested in my love life than in me, and that has a certain effect. You start to feel very empty and worth nothing, you start to become a piece in a board game you never wanted to play.
I didn’t know I would cry when I actually cut my hair, but I felt empty when something kept dropping and disappearing.
When I’m on a train and see an empty pitch, it gives me a certain pleasure that I can’t quite describe. It’s to do with potential.
And I just remember, you know, breaking into tears and feeling so empty because, as long as Elvis was in the world, you always knew something was going and he always had something that kept everybody mesmerized.
So much of my sense of who I am is tied to mothering. When they left home, I fell into a huge, empty, black hole. Your children are grown and your career has slowed down – all the stuff that took up so much attention is gone, and you’re left with expansive time and space.
When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty.
Digital platforms are worthless without content. They’re shiny sacks with bells and whistles, but without content, they’re empty sacks. It is not about pixels versus print. It is not about how you’re reading. It is about what you’re reading.
Diets – the ultimate empty promise perpetuating the same cycle over and over again. We’ve all been victims of yo-yo dieting. We stick to some diets longer than others, but c’mon, just how much cabbage soup can a person eat?
Time’s Up is finally, it would seem, activism with some teeth. It isn’t perfect, however. One of the first acts of protest – urging celebrities to wear black to awards shows – reveals a worrisome willingness to keep lunging toward those lazy, meaningless and empty gestures that cheapen the seriousness of an issue.
What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed?
I remember sitting on the back of the bus on the first day of the Social Experiment tour with my face in my hands. I emptied out my bank account, and before I did that tour, that was the number one thing I said I’d never do. I’ll never empty out my savings.
A friend of mine said something powerful at his grandfather’s funeral. He said that the greatest lesson from his grandfather’s life was that he died empty, because he accomplished everything he wanted, with no regrets. I think that, along with leaving a legacy, would be the greatest sign of success.
When I got out of Job Corps, I was an empty shell. I didn’t know what to do with myself.
Some of us only meet in the most fleeting moments; some of us never meet, but still hear about one another and therefore cherish what we know from what we’ve heard, and mourn the loss, even though we’re spared what the close-loved ones must endure – the ongoing pain of an empty place in the heart for the rest of life.
Losing my daughter was a very serious pain. There was always some empty space in my heart.
I’ll tell you this: You have to remember to chase and catch your dreams, because if you don’t, your imagination will live in empty spaces, and that’s nowhere land.
I did a few DJ gigs at empty clubs, sort of as a warm-up set before Flume was a thing. I did one when I got big enough, and I had five friends come down, and they were the only ones dancing. That was one of my earliest ones. I was super nervous.
The first thing I do when I wake up is cardio on an empty stomach. I’ll just drink water, or maybe I’ll have a black coffee with no sugar, and I’ll do about 25 minutes of cardio, six days a week.
People ‘demand’ the opportunity to gamble away money they do not have, just like people ‘demand’ money from loan sharks at extortionate interest rates. This is a warped, empty type of freedom, in which the powerful are free to exploit the vulnerable.
I’m in awe of the universe, but I don’t necessarily believe there’s an intelligence or agent behind it. I do have a passion for the visual in religious rituals, though, even though they may be completely empty and bereft of substance.
I have always demanded the maximum of myself, but the tank is quite empty. The balance of the hard work I put in day in and day out and the satisfaction I get out of it at the end of the day is no longer there.
I agree that sometimes Michelle Obama can come across as angry – and anger is discomforting. We venerate that empty word, closure, wanting to seal off the pain of the past and refusing it admittance to the chirpy present. This, of course, is nonsense.
Acting is probably the greatest therapy in the world. You can get a lot stuff out of you on the set so you don’t have to take it home with you at night. It’s the stuff between the lines, the empty space between those lines which is interesting.
I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.
I think about that ’empty’ space a lot. That emptiness is what allows for something to actually evolve in a natural way. I’ve had to learn that over the years – because one of the traps of being an artist is to always want to be creating, always wanting to produce.
When I was 9 or 10, I had a ten-cent business: I would walk your dog for a dime, go to the store for a dime, empty your garbage for a dime – and then I could use the money to buy tricks at the magic store.
If we talk about the glass being half empty or half full, I want to know what does the glass look like from underneath the table?
When I’m feeling a little empty in the head, I like to go see movies or read to loosen things up there.
When I was 11, I burned a field down by mistake. It was an empty field, probably about 10 acres in size. Me and my friend were lighting firecrackers, and we ended up burning down the entire field. We got found out, and I think I was grounded for about three months.
The first thing I did was give up sweet tea because I drank so much. I’d start drinking at lunchtime and wouldn’t set it down until I went to bed. When you calculate how much empty calories and how much sugar I was consuming, it was staggering. So I haven’t had a glass of sweet tea in three years.
If a farmer fills his barn with grain, he gets mice. If he leaves it empty, he gets actors.
Space is certainly something more complicated than the average person would probably realize. Space is not just an empty background in which things happen.
The truth is you can’t get more water from reservoirs that are empty.
I am convinced that material things can contribute a lot to making one’s life pleasant, but, basically, if you do not have very good friends and relatives who matter to you, life will be really empty and sad and material things cease to be important.
I also wanted to express the strength of cinema to hide reality, while being entertaining. Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.
Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!
A lot of people tend to get intimidated by looking at a place where they’re from as empty. I look at it like a clean slate.
Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.
To go out with the setting sun on an empty beach is to truly embrace your solitude.
I used to empty the studio out and throw stuff away. I now don’t. There will be a whole series of dead ends that a year or two down the line I’ll come back to.
