“We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.”

“Julia looked back at Hadassah on the bloodstained sand. A great emptiness opened within her as she looked at the still form. Gone, too, was the salt that had kept her from completely corruption.”

“The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space.”

“He held her hand because he wanted her heart; then gazed into her empty eyes and realized nothing was there. Often, the emotions of someone we love are dismissed in a continual effort to remain.”

“The future rose up ahead of her, a succession of empty days, each more daunting and unknowable than the one before her.”

“In the end we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn't name.”

“And the broad who served the whisky
She was a big old friendly girl.
And she tried to fight her empty nights
By smilin' at the world.”

“The kitchen was just as empty, even the refrigerator gone, the chairs, the table--the kitchen cabinets stood open, their bare shelves reminder her of a nursery rhyme. She cleared her throat. "What would demons," she said, "want with our microwave?”

“The path ahead is wide open and you feel a sense of emptiness; in the moment, you realize your heart is empty and the one who can make it overflow with joy, never will.”

“When women take their education and their abilities seriously and put them to use, ultimately they have to compete with men. It is better for a woman to compete impersonally in society, as men do, than to compete for dominance in her own home with her husband, compete with her neighbors for empty status, and so smother her son that he cannot compete at all.”