Empty Phenomena

Famous quotes containing the words empty and/or phenomena:

    “History counts its skeletons in round numbers.
    A thousand and one remains a thousand,
    as though the one had never existed:
    an imaginary embryo, an empty cradle,
    ...
    emptiness running down steps toward the garden,
    nobody’s place in line.”
    —Wislawa Szymborska (b. 1923)

    “The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
    —Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)