"I was waiting for the longest time, she said. I thought you forgot.

It is hard to forget, I said, when there is such an empty space when you are gone."
— Brian Andreas (Story People)

"One day, someone showed me a glass of water that was half full. And he said, "Is it half full or half empty?" So I drank the water. No more problem."
— Alexander Jodorowsky

"This was something she would keep hidden within herself, maybe in place of the knot of pain and anger she had been carrying under her breastbone...a security blanket, an ace up her sleeve. She might never use it, but she would always feel its presence like a swelling secret stone, and that way when she let go of the rage, she would not feel nearly as empty."
— Jodi Picoult (Mercy)

"You must know nothing before you can learn something, and be empty before you can be filled. Is not the emptiness of the bowl what makes it useful? As for laws, a parrot can repeat them word for word. Their spirit is something else again. As for governing, one must first be lowest before being highest.""
— Lloyd Alexander (The Remarkable Journey of Prince Jen)

"There ARE people who won't customarily eat an entire row of cookies, or hear food calling their name from other rooms, or who don't grind up food in the garbage disposal for fear of eating it, or get it back out of the garbage so they could eat it. Of course, my binge eating was just a cover-up for the larger issue: Trying to fill the emptiness"
— Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy (SARK) (Transformation Soup: Healing for the Splendidly Imperfect)

"In the end, this volume should be read a s a collection of love stories, Above all, they are tales of love, not the love with which so many stories end – the love of fidelity, kindness and fertility – but the other side of love, its cruelty, sterility and duplicity. In a way, the decadents did accept Nordau's idea of the artist as monster. But in nature, the glory and panacea of romanticism, they found nothing. Theirs is an aesthetic that disavows the natural and with it the body. The truly beautiful body is dead, because it is empty. Decadent work is always morbid, but its attraction to death is through art. What they refused was the condemnation of that monster. And yet despite the decadent celebration of artifice, these stories record art's failure in the struggle against natural horror. Nature fights back and wins, and decadent writing remains a remarkable account of that failure."
— Asti Hustvedt (The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France)

"If the glass of water is half empty in your eyes, then drink it and pour yourself another cup that's full."
— Katie Davison