Famous quotes containing the words empty and/or phenomena:
“When a poor disconsolated drooping creature is terrified from all enjoyment,—prays without ceasing ‘till his imagination is heated,—fasts and mortifies and mopes, till his body is in as bad a plight as his mind; is it a wonder, that the mechanical disturbances ... of an empty belly, interpreted by an empty head, should be mistook for [the] workings [of God].”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“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)