“As to your Newton, I confess I do not understand his void and his gravity; I admit he has demonstrated the movement of the heavenly bodies with more exactitude than his forerunners; but you will admit it is an absurdity to maintain the existence of Nothing.”
― Frederick the Great, Letter to Voltaire, 25 Nov. 1777“By convention sweet and by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention color; but in reality atoms and void.”
― Democritus, Sourcebook in Ancient Philosophy“Let them be gone now, them and all the others, those I have used and those I have not used, give me back the pains I lent them and vanish, from my life, my memory, my terrors and shames. There, now there is no one here but me, no one wheels about me, no one comes toward me, no one has ever met anyone before my eyes, these creatures have never been, only I and this black void have ever been.”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable“The streets smell of a hunger which has nothing to do with love; they smell of the belly which is insatiable and of the creations of the empty hell which are null and void.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn“…nor can we know ahead of the fact the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaningless itself.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking