“The objects I chose were designed to hold something, but I didn't fill them up. They remained empty. They were little symbolic shrines to thirst.”

—  Margaret Atwood

Source: Moral Disorder and Other Stories

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The objects I chose were designed to hold something, but I didn't fill them up. They remained empty. They were little s…" by Margaret Atwood?
Margaret Atwood photo
Margaret Atwood 348
Canadian writer 1939

Related quotes

Richard Wright photo

“Not to know the end of the tale filled me with a sense of emptiness, loss. I hungered for the sharp, frightening, breathtaking, almost painful excitement that the story had given me, and I vowed that as soon as I was old enough I would buy all the novels there were and read them to feed that thirst for violence that was in me, for intrigue, for plotting, for secrecy, for bloody murders.”

Richard Wright book Black Boy

Black Boy (1945)

Ernest Hemingway photo

“By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Moveable Feast

Source: A Moveable Feast

Laurie Halse Anderson photo

“Didn't help to ponder things that were forever gone. It only made a body restless and fill up with bees, all wanting to sting something.”

Laurie Halse Anderson book Chains

Source: Chains

Jonathan Ive photo

“My father was a really good craftsman – he was a silversmith – so I grew up understanding how things were made. That’s something that’s easy to take for granted, but everything that has been made has been thought about, designed, and I think that growing up with an appreciation of the nature of objects was hugely influential to me.”

Jonathan Ive (1967) English designer and VP of Design at Apple

Vogue: "Quiet By Design: Naomi Campbell Interviews Jony Ive" (2 April 2018)

Abbas Kiarostami photo

“From my very first movie, what was my concentration, my inspiration, was I didn't want to narrate something, I didn't want to tell a story. I wanted to show something, I wanted for them to make their own story from what they were seeing.”

Abbas Kiarostami (1940–2016) Iranian film director, screenwriter, photographer and film producer

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/2009/01/a-conversation-with-kiarostami.html

Kazimir Malevich photo

“I too was filled with a sort of shyness and fear, as I was called to leave 'the world of will and idea' in which I had lived and created, and in whose reality I had believed. But the happy liberating touch of non-objectivity drew me out into the 'desert' where only feeling is real.... and so feeling became the content of my life. It was no 'empty square' I had exhibited but the feeling of non-objectivity. I perceived that the 'thing' and the 'idea' were taken to be equivalents of feeling, and understood the lie of the world of will and idea. Is the milk bottle the symbol of milk? Suprematism is the rediscovery of that pure art which in the course of time, and by an accretion of 'things', had been lost to sight.”

Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) Russian and Soviet artist of polish descent

As quoted in Artists on Art; from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 453
1921 - 1930

Adrienne von Speyr photo

“… one morning, when it was barely light, I woke up because of a golden light that filled the whole wall above my bed, and I saw something like a picture of the Holy Virgin, surrounded by several other personages … and several angels, some of whom were as big as she, while others were like little children. It was like a tableau, and yet the Holy Virgin was alive, in heaven, and the angels were changing position. I believe this lasted for a very long time. I looked, as if praying without words, and I was struck with amazement; I had never seen anything so beautiful. At the beginning, all of the light was like very vibrant gold; it faded little by little, and, as it faded, the face and the hands of the Holy Virgin became more alive and clearer. I was not frightened in the least but filled with a new joy that was both intense and very sweet.”

Adrienne von Speyr (1902–1967) Swiss doctor and mystic

The vision of Mary, p. 166
My Early Years (1968)

Pablo Neruda photo

“There were thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit.
There were grief and the ruins, and you were the miracle.”

Pablo Neruda book Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Source: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Mickey Spillane photo

“The two young men turned and they didn't smile because they were Woody Ballinger's two boys, Carl and Sammy, and for one brief instant, there was something in their faces that didn't belong in that atmosphere of joviality and the little move they instinctively made that shielded them behind the others in back of them was involuntary enough to stretch a tight-lipped grin across my face that told them I could know.
Could.
From away back out of the years I got that feeling across my shoulders and up my spine that said things were starting to smell right and if you kept pushing the walls would go down and you could charge in and take them all apart until there was nothing left but the dirt they were made of.”

Mickey Spillane (1918–2006) American writer

Survival...Zero! (1970)

Eugéne Ionesco photo

“I let characters and symbols emerge from me, as if I were dreaming.”

Eugéne Ionesco (1909–1994) Romanian playwright

The Paris Review interview (1984)
Context: I let characters and symbols emerge from me, as if I were dreaming. I always use what remains of my dreams of the night before. Dreams are reality at its most profound, and what you invent is truth because invention, by its nature, can’t be a lie. Writers who try to prove something are unattractive to me, because there is nothing to prove and everything to imagine. So I let words and images emerge from within. If you do that, you might prove something in the process.

Related topics