Empty Chamber

Famous quotes containing the words empty chamber, empty and/or chamber:

    Science with its retorts would have put me to sleep; it was the opportunity to be ignorant that I improved. It suggested to me that there was something to be seen if one had eyes. It made a believer of me more than before. I believed that the woods were not tenantless, but choke-full of honest spirits as good as myself any day,—not an empty chamber, in which chemistry was left to work alone, but an inhabited house,—and for a few moments I enjoyed fellowship with them.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    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)

    Another day. Deliberations are recessed
    In an iron-blue chamber of that afternoon
    On which we wore things and looked well at
    A slab of business rising behind the stars.
    John Ashbery (b. 1927)