Quotes about nothing
page 31

“She tried to remind herself that beauty was only skin deep, but that didn't offer any helpful excuses when she was berating herself for never knowing what to say to people. There was nothing more depressing than an ugly girl with no personality.”

Julia Quinn (1970) American novelist

Source: Romancing Mister Bridgerton

People, Beauty, Girl, Help

“Keep true to the rare music in your heart, to the marvelous and unique form that is and shall always be nothing else but you. Keep to that and you can do no wrong, which I realize is easier said than done.”

Mark Z. Danielewski (1965) Novelist

Music, Heart

“Nothing truly real is forgotten eternally, because everything real comes from eternity and goes to eternity.”

Paul Tillich (1886–1965) German-American theologian and philosopher

Source: The Eternal Now

“Nothing a man suffers will prevent him from inflicting suffering on others. Indeed, it will teach him the way”

Barry Unsworth book Sacred Hunger

Source: Sacred Hunger

Way, Suffering

“Saving the world is only a hobby. Most of the time I do nothing.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

World, Time

“There was nothing I loved more than teasing Dimitri. Well, aside from maybe kissing him.”

Richelle Mead Blood Promise

Source: Blood Promise

Love, Kiss

“Nothing is so loved by tyrants as obedient subjects.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

Love

“they say that
nothing is wasted:
either that
or
it al is”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

“To anyone who took the trouble to look, I was plainly visible, but when people are expecting to see nothing, that is usually what they see.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

People

“Nothing truly wild is unclean.”

John Muir book My First Summer in the Sierra

Source: My First Summer in the Sierra

“Nothing is static.”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

“I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. It took seven languages to make me; it would be nice if I could have spoken just one.”

Nicole Krauss (1974) American novelist

“… if you're alone nothing bad can happen to you.”

Bret Easton Ellis book Imperial Bedrooms

Source: Imperial Bedrooms

“Delete nothing. Move nothing. Change nothing. Learn everything.”

Poppy Z. Brite (1967) Novelist, short story writer, food writer

Learning, Change

“There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

Often attributed to Hugo as a paraphrase of a similar idea in his Histore d'un Crime (1877): "One resists the invasion of armies; one does not resist the invasion of ideas", the wording of this famous statement actually more closely resembles a passage from the relatively obscure Les Francs-Tireurs (1861) by Gustave Aimard, p. 68 https://books.google.com/books/about/Les_francs_tireurs.html?id=mKI4AQAAIAAJ: Il y a quelque chose de plus puissant que la force brutale des baïonnettes: c'est l'idée dont le temps est venu et l'heure est sonnée. There is something more powerful than the brute force of bayonets: it is the idea whose time has come and hour struck. Translated into English as The Freebooters : A Story of the Texan War (1861) https://archive.org/details/freebootersstory00aima, p. 57, Ward & Lock edition Misattributed Variant: More powerful than the mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.

Idea, Time

“Self-esteem isn't everything; it's just that there's nothing without it.”

Gloria Steinem (1934) American feminist and journalist

“All these words, words like 'evil' and 'vicious', they meant nothing to Nature. Yes, evil was a human invention.”

John Marsden book Tomorrow, When the War Began

Source: Tomorrow, When the War Began

Nature, Evil

“He suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

“Faith is the truth of passion. Since no passion is more true than another, faith is the truth of nothing.”

R. Scott Bakker book The Darkness That Comes Before

Source: The Darkness That Comes Before

Truth, Faith, Passion

“Looks like a bite mark. What have you been doing all day, anyway?"
"Nothing. I went walking in the park. Tried to clear my head."
"And ran into a vampire?"
"What? No! I fell."
"On your neck?”

Cassandra Clare The Mortal Instruments

Jace and Alec, pg. 73-74
The Mortal Instruments, City of Ashes (2008)

“There is nothing more touching to me then a family picture where everyone is trying to look his or her best, but you can see what a mess they all really are.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Source: Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

Family

“Nothing is hidden, nothing is ever lost, nothing is ever forgotten. That's always been part of my problem.”

Simon R. Green (1955) British writer

Source: Drinking Midnight Wine

Problem, Parting

“I am as sure as I live that nothing is so near to me as God. God is nearer to me than I am to myself; my existence depends on the nearness and the presence of God.”

Meister Eckhart (1260–1328) German theologian

God, Dependency

“When she had been married a little while, she concluded that love was half a longing of a kind that possession did nothing to mitigate.”

Marilynne Robinson book Housekeeping

Source: Housekeeping

Love

“You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do.”

Hilary Mantel book Wolf Hall

Source: Wolf Hall

Men, World, Learning

“Choices are easy when you have nothing to lose.”

Barbara Delinsky (1945) American writer

Source: While My Sister Sleeps

“He loved her because it was his nature to do so, but there were times when he could not endure her love for him. There were times when it became nothing but pure idiot mystery…”

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) American novelist, short story writer

Source: Everything That Rises Must Converge: Stories

Love, Nature, Time

“You will tell me what you know now," he said.

"Or?"

He said nothing, so I elaborated. "See, this kind of threat usually has an 'or' attached to it. Or an 'and'. 'Tell me and I'll allow you to live' or something like that.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Bites

“Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book."

(Acceptance speech,, November 17, 2010)”

Patti Smith (1946) American singer-songwriter, poet and visual artist

Books, World, Beauty

“Love weighs nothing.”

Barbara Kingsolver (1955) American author, poet and essayist

Love

“Without love, most of life remains concealed. Nothing is as fascinating as love, unfortunately.”

Hanif Kureishi (1954) English playwright, screenwriter, novelist

Source: Intimacy: das Buch zum Film von Patrice Chéreau

Love, Life

“…the death of my mother was the thing that made me believe the most deeply in my safety: nothing bad could happen to me, I thought. The worst thing already had.”

Cheryl Strayed book Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Source: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Death

“Nothing in life is fair. Fair is a dirty word and I'll thank you not to use that language around me.”

Jeff Lindsay book Dexter in the Dark

Source: Dexter in the Dark

Life

“I did the right thing, didn't I? It all worked out in the end.'In the end'? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.”

Alan Moore book Watchmen

Source: Watchmen

“Why you?
- (…) I’m the best.
- Modest of you.
- I am the best. Modesty has nothing to say about it.”

Paul Hoffman book The Left Hand of God

Source: The Left Hand of God

“Was life nothing more than a storm that constantly washed away what had been there only a moment before, and left behind something barren and unrecognizable?”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

Life

“Probably the closest things to perfection are the huge absolutely empty holes that astronomers have recently discovered in space. If there's nothing there, how can anything go wrong?”

Richard Brautigan book An Unfortunate Woman: A Journey

Page 15
An Unfortunate Woman: A Journey

Perfection

“Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing." "So what's something?" "Being reliable is something. Being good.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

William Black talking with Oskar
"A Simple Solution to an Impossible Problem" (p. 297)
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)
Context: "It's easy to be emotional. You can always make a scene... Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they're nothing." "So what's something?" "Being reliable is something. Being good."

Feeling

“You could run to the farthest corners of the earth. There's no place you could go where I wouldn't love you. Nothing you could do to stop me.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Love in the Afternoon

Love

“Death is forever. Death is nothing. But to save a life, that’s everything.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Breaks

Life, Death

“Life is doubt,
And faith without doubt is nothing but death.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

Life, Death, Faith

“There was nothing like having a dead husband return from the grave to ruin a fine spring morning.”

Jayne Ann Krentz (1948) American novelist

Source: Second Sight

Spring, Dead

“They had nothing to say to each other. A five-year age gap between siblings is like a garden that needs constant attention. Even three months apart allows the weeds to grow up between you.”

Zadie Smith On Beauty

Source: On Beauty

Age, Siblings

“Take it from me, there's nothing like a job well done. Except the quiet enveloping darkness at the bottom of a bottle of Jim Beam after a job done any way at all.”

Hunter S. Thompson book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Source: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Way

“All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.”

Aldous Huxley book Crome Yellow

Source: Crome Yellow

“I let him run on, this papier-maché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

“[A] pessimist gets nothing but pleasant surprises, an optimist nothing but unpleasant.”

Rex Stout book Fer-de-Lance

Source: Fer-de-Lance

“Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.”

Bram Stoker book Dracula

Source: Dracula

Science

“All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

“And while seeing Trent in his tighty-whities would make my decade, I’d found out long ago that I couldn’t stay mad at a man wearing nothing but underwear. They looked so charmingly vulnerable.”

Kim Harrison (1966) Pseudonym

Source: The Outlaw Demon Wails

Madness

“It’s a funny thing coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same, even smells the same. You realize what’s changed, is you.”

Eric Roth (1945) American screenwriter

Source: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Screenplay

Feeling, Home, Change

“From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year… death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever.”

Graham Greene book The Quiet American

Source: The Quiet American

Life, Death, Happiness, World

“There is nothing I detest so much as the contortions of these great time-and-lip servers, these affable dispensers of meaningless embraces, these obliging utterers of empty words, who view every one in civilities”

Molière The Misanthrope

Source: The Misanthrope

Time

“The promoters of the global economy… see nothing odd or difficult about unlimited economic growth or unlimited consumption in a limited world.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Source: Another Turn of the Crank

World

“The entire teaching of Buddhism can be summed up in this way: Nothing is worth holding on to.”

Jack Kornfield (1945) American writer

Source: Living Dharma: Teachings of Twelve Buddhist Masters

Way

“I missed him. Love, I realized, was something your spine memorized. There was nothing you could do about that.”

Lorrie Moore (1957) American writer

Source: Anagrams

Love

“There. She had thanked Sebastian. She waited for a bolt of lightning to shoot out of the clouds and striker her dead. But nothing happened.”

Cassandra Clare The City of Lost Souls

Source: City of Lost Souls

Waiting, Dead

“Life isn't hard to manage when you've nothing to lose.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Farewell to Arms

Source: A Farewell to Arms (1929), Ch. 21

Life

“We laughed about all the kids who believed in the Santa Clause myth and got nothing but a bunch of cheap plastic toys. 'Years from now, when all the junk they got is broken and long forgotten,' Dad said, ' you'll still have your stars.”

Jeannette Walls book The Glass Castle

Source: The Glass Castle

Star

“Faith is necessary to men; woe to him who believes in nothing!”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

Men, Faith

“I think that the point is that people rarely understand that nothing is ever exactly what you think it will be.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Longest Ride

Source: The Longest Ride

People, Understanding, Thinking

“I got nothing. Even the spies I’m spying on who are spying on other spies got nothing.”

Kresley Cole American writer

Source: Shadow's Claim

“There is no hurry. Time means nothing
to you.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966

Time

“There is nothing so loathsome as a sentimental surrealist.”

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Source: Gravity's Rainbow

“There's nothing like your mother's sympathetic voice to make you want to burst into tears.”

Sophie Kinsella book The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic

Source: Confessions of a Shopaholic

Tear, Mother's Day, For Parents, For Mother

“There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more”

Alexandre Dumas book The Count of Monte Cristo

Chapter 117 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Count_of_Monte_Cristo/Chapter_117 The Count of Monte Cristo (1845–1846)

Happiness, World, Wise, Hope

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.”

Wendy Mass (1967) American children's writer

Source: The Candymakers

Fight

“Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge. The bridge was being repaired: she went right through the Danger sign. The car fell a hundred feet into the ravine, smashing through the treetops feathery with new leaves, then burst into flames and rolled down into the shallow creek at the bottom. Chunks of the bridge fell on top of it. Nothing much was left but charred smithereens.”

Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin

Source: The Blind Assassin (2000) first lines

War, Cars, Sister

“We all suffer under a curse, the curse that we know more than we can endure, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing we can do about the force and the lure of this knowledge.”

Anne Rice (1941) American writer

Source: Vittorio, The Vampire

Knowledge, Suffering

“Freedom's just another word for "nothing left to lose".”

Kris Kristofferson (1936) American country music singer, songwriter, musician, and film actor

Song lyrics, Me and Bobby McGee (1969)
Variant: Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose
Nothing ain't worth nothing but it's free

Freedom

“Who wouldn't be a mountaineer! Up here all the world's prizes seem nothing”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

World, Mountain

“Yes, well, life is a folly. If you live long enough, nothing is surprising.”

Tracy Chevalier book Girl with a Pearl Earring

Source: Girl with a Pearl Earring

Life

“A woman's got one life: She's got to reach out and grab it with both hands, or it'll pass her by and leave nothing but a smelly old fart in her face.”

Robin Schone (1954) American writer

Source: Scandalous Lovers

Life

“The life where nothing was ever unexpected. Or inconvenient. Or unusual. The life without colour, pain or past.”

Lois Lowry book The Giver

Source: The Giver

Life, Pain, Past

“You owe the companies nothing. You especially don't owe them any courtesy. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.”

Banksy pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, and painter

taken from 'Brandalism' in the book 'Cut It Out' (inspired from Sean Tejaratchi's piece in Crap Hound No.6, July 1999.) Source http://readingfrenzy.com/ledger/2012/03/taking_the_piss_conclusion Other sources Source: Wall and Piece Context: People are taking the piss out of you every day. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.

World

“I no longer drink nearly as much as I used to but, still, my motto is Sine coffea nihil sum. Without coffee, I'm nothing.”

Sarah Vowell (1969) American author, journalist, essayist and social commentator

Coffee, Drink

“Forget the self and you will fear nothing, in whatever level or awareness you find yourself to be.”

Carlos Castaneda (1925–1998) Peruvian-American author

Source: The Active Side of Infinity

Fear, Forgetting

“And you know, these things don't last forever.'

I know, Mandy. Nothing does.'

That's the spirit.”

Scott Westerfeld book So Yesterday

Source: So Yesterday

“The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing. Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

“Cleverness is a quality a man likes to have in his wife as long as she is some distance away from him. Up close, he'll take kindness any day of the week, if there's nothing more alluring to be had.”

Margaret Atwood book The Penelopiad

Source: The Penelopiad

“Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.”

Herman Melville book Poor Man's Pudding and Rich Man's Crumbs

Poor Man's Pudding and Rich Man's Crumbs (1854)

Housing

“It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.”

Niccolo Machiavelli book The Prince

Variant: It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things.
Source: The Prince (1513), Ch. 6
Context: It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.

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