“Beneath all this gaiety and baroque complexity lay the simple and so carefully denied: beyond the thin metal surrounding us was the endless humorless void. Hollow rings the laughter of orphans in the night.”

— Norman Spinrad, book The Void Captain's Tale

Source: The Void Captain's Tale (1983), Chapter 11 (p. 139)

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Norman Spinrad19

American science fiction writer and critic 1940

Henry Vaughan (1621–1695) Welsh author, physician and metaphysical poet

"The World".
Silex Scintillans (1655)

“The Void is a living void
… pulsating in endless rhythms of creation
and destruction. The great Void does not
exist as Void, it embraces all
Being/non-Being”

Frederick Franck (1909–2006) Dutch painter

Source: Echoes from the Bottomless Well (1985), p. 63

“Modern disillusion is unlikely to last forever, and nothing rings so hollow as the angst of yesterday.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Reading (1990)

“So when or you or I are made
A fable, song, or fleeting shade,
All love, all liking, all delight
Lies drowned with us in endless night.”

Robert Herrick book Hesperides

"Corinna's Going A-Maying".
Hesperides (1648)

“All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly deconstructive. For if the complex can be put into the simple, then it cannot be as complex as it seemed in the first place; and if the simple can be an adequate medium of such complexity, then it cannot after all be as simple as all that.”

Terry Eagleton (1943) British writer, academic and educator

Source: 1980s, Against The Grain (1986), Ch. 10, The Critic as Clown

“Is there beyond the silent night
An endless day?
Is death a door that leads to light?
We cannot say.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

"The Devil" (1899) http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38804/38804-h/38804-h.htm Section IX, "Conclusion: Declaration of the Free" Compare: "the door of Darkness", The Rubaiyat, stanza 64.