Quotes About Empty Rooms

#1. Now, 75 years [after To Kill a Mockingbird], in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.
[Open Letter, O Magazine, July 2006]

Harper Lee

#2. All he knew was all those empty rooms inside him were somehow filled when Mateo was around.

Riley Hart

#3. At every step of her rise, she did the work long before she was granted the title. It was like advancing through empty rooms. Nobody opposed her, yet nobody approved of her progress.

Ayn Rand

#4. The empty rooms always had a terribly depressing effect upon my father when he considered, he said, that the person who dwelt in them had to fill them solely with his own fantasies, with fantastic objects, in order not to go out of his mind.

Thomas Bernhard

#5. The Internet is a perfect diversion from learning ... it opens many doors that lead to empty rooms.

Clifford Stoll

#6. Now ... in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, ipods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.

Harper Lee

#7. 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.

William Kennedy

#8. I think you can photograph a certain sliver of human presence in its absence ... images taken in the empty rooms, the marks left on the walls, disappearing shadows, etc.

Mona Kuhn

#9. At one point, she said after a while, at one point we thought we might raise silkworms in one of the empty rooms. But then we never did. Oh, for the countless things one fails to do!

W.G. Sebald

#10. The Mullahs and monks, they must worship you instead of empty rooms.

M.F. Moonzajer

#11. I was unable to throw myself in the ocean, she writes, the handwriting more erratic as the painkillers seep into every cell, shutting out lights in empty rooms.

Nick Flynn

#12. They wordlessly excused each other for not loving each other as much as they had planned to. There were empty rooms in the house where they had meant to put their love, and they worked together to fill these rooms with midcentury modern furniture. ("Birthmark").

Miranda July

#13. The men were making too much noise, laughing, joking, to cover her terrible accusing silence below. She made the empty rooms roar with accusation and shake down a fine dust go guilt that was sucked in their nostrils as they plunged about.

Ray Bradbury

#14. I play in a lot of empty rooms.

Colin Hay

#15. As all partings foreshadow the great final one, - so, empty rooms, bereft of a familiar presence, mournfully whisper what your room and what mine must one day be.

Charles Dickens

#16. And of all the rooms in my childhood,
God was the largest
and most empty.

Li-Young Lee

#17. He's swept with the broom of contempt and the rooms have an empty ring.

Joni Mitchell

#18. The most beautiful rooms I have entered have been empty ones. Warehouses full of light and dust. Empty attics with a view. Coastlines. Prairies.

Yann Martel

#19. Empty the theaters save for clowns and furnish the rooms with glass walls and pretty colors running up and down the walls like confetti or blood or sherry or sauterne.

Ray Bradbury

#20. An empty room is a story waiting to happen, and you are the author.

Charlotte Moss

#21. The more we empty ourselves, the more room we give God to fill us.

Mother Teresa

#22. Our beds are empty two-thirds of the time. Our living rooms are empty seven-eighths of the time. Our office buildings are empty one-half of the time. It's time we gave this some thought.

R. Buckminster Fuller

#23. Death is the room that is always empty.

John Fowles

#24. You don't need great actors to do a 3D picture. All of this condescending stuff that they put out? "Oh, we will always need actors." Bullshit! They are able to take anybody and put some markers on them, and have them walk through an empty room. Then they paint in the background.

William Friedkin

#25. How loud clocks can tick when a room is empty, and one is alone!

Amy Lowell

#26. The first time I walked through the spacious house, I didn't see possibility or a new start. I saw a big, empty space. These rooms looked like all I did not have, every room a challenge, rather than an opportunity.

Jill Talbot

#27. I know love is worth the time it takes to find. Think of that when all the world seems made of walk up rooms and hands in empty pockets

Gerry Spence

#28. I only really understand myself, what I'm really thinking and feelings, when I've talked it over with my circle of female friends. When days go by without that connection, I feel like a radio playing in an empty room.

Anna Quindlen

#29. When they have a choice, people will always gravitate to those rooms which have light on two sides, and leave the rooms which are lit only from one side unused and empty.

Christopher Alexander

#30. Being in a foreign place, preferably for the first time, having seen many things and collected new impressions, and returning to an empty hotel room with an hour or so to blow. That mix often yields fine results.

Stefan Sagmeister

#31. I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.

C.S. Lewis

#32. I have these thoughts. I think "What if the show doesn't sell well? What if it's a half-empty room?" These are the paranoia thoughts that go through my head on a day-by-day basis.

Ladyhawke

#33. There was a sadness just beneath the surface of his pleasant expression. It drifted across his face like a ghost moving through the vacant rooms of an empty house.

M. Leighton

#34. I used to like to break into other people's houses and sit in their rooms. I found it very comforting to be in someone's empty house.

Jared Leto

#35. I wish there was something more that performers could do other than get out there and sing at benefit performances. I wish I felt that if I had an empty room I'd like to bring in someone and make it a hospice, but I'm not Mother Teresa. I can't do that.

Bea Arthur

#36. Whoever prefers the material comforts of life over intellectual wealth is like the owner of a palace who moves into the servants' quarters and leaves the sumptuous rooms empty.

Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach

#37. Always hold your sales meetings in rooms too small for the audience, even if it means holding them in the WC. 'Standing room only' creates an atmosphere of success, as in theatres and restaurants, while a half-empty auditorium smells of failure.

David Ogilvy

#38. When the mind's an empty room
The clear days come.

Wendell Berry

#39. I can really recommend a beautifully but sparsely furnished room with empty walls!

Semir Zeki

#40. I'm more preoccupied with furnishing my head than the place where I live. The most beautiful rooms I have entered have been empty ones.

Yann Martel