Vacuity Quotes

“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

“When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

“I relinquished myself to existence pure and simple, thinking absolutely nothing—as if my mind were merely an echo chamber for the music, as if it contained only ether or at most a vaguely pleasant odor as of roses preserved between the pages of a book, their significance long forgotten. The tongue of the road gobbled me up and I allowed myself to sink like a tasty mouthful all the way to the bottom of a marvelous, rejuvenating vacuity. Later, it would occur to me it’s the emptiness we mistakenly call Innocence.”
― Sol Luckman, Beginner's Luke

“Although some people think women are inferior to men, I think it's a privilege to be a woman. There are so many fun things afforded to the female gender such as adornment of self, the freedom to communicate with gestures, and the freedom to express one's emotions.
I don't know what I'd do without my red backpack purse, and I am attached to my PDA with the pink monogrammed leather case. I've developed favorites among the many items in my wardrobe, and I like experimenting with accessories like hats, scarves, watches and belts.
I've become fairly proficient at applying make-up, and I now know the importance of a good facial cleanser and moisturizer.”
― Jessica Angelina Birch, Confessions of a Transsexual Physician

“I think some entertainers have been very irresponsible in their part in making drug use a fad among young people. They say, look at so-and-so, he's a pot head and look what it has done for him. The truth is, he was talented to start with. I mean, if you have vacuity and expand it, you still have vacuity.”
― Oliver

“The worm that devours the parasite that enables it to digest, and dies of it. The crustacean that wanders beneath the sea until it finds a fixed point. Once secured to that spot, it devours its own brain, which is now useless since it served it only to find this landing place. In this same way, we devour the Nothing that enables us to digest the world, and without which we cannot survive. But we cannot prevent ourselves from doing so - just as the scorpion cannot prevent itself from killing the frog that gets it across the river.

Heavenly bodies are irresponsible - who would hold it against them? Ultimate responsibility is light years away.

Contemporary art summed up by a London taxi driver outside Tate Modern: 'When you go in, you understand why it's free.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“...always
Staring at that man, hearing the click,
Click of his brain's whirling empty spindle...

[from 'Returning a Lost Child'}”
― Louise Glück, The First Four Books of Poems