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)

    “The language of the younger generation ... has the brutality of the city and an assertion of threatening power at hand, not to come. It is military, theatrical, and at its most coherent probably a lasting repudiation of empty courtesy and bureaucratic euphemism.”
    —Elizabeth Hardwick (b. 1916)

    “A snake, with mottles rare,
    Surveyed my chamber floor,
    In feature as the worm before,
    But ringed with power.”
    —Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)