“Insegnami com'è
Dire addio e non girarsi a guardare”
- Achille Lauro, Penelope
“To repose in perfection is the desire of all those who strive for excellence, and is not nothingness a form of perfection?”
―Thomas Mann, Death in Venice"
“4 December.To die would mean nothing else than to surrender a nothing to the nothing, but that would be impossible to conceive, for how could a person, even only as a nothing, consciously surrender himself to the nothing, and not merely to an empty nothing but rather to a roaring nothing whose nothingness consists only in its incomprehensibility.“
―Franz Kafka, from his diaries
“…nothing ever as much as begun, nothing ever but nothing and never, nothing ever but lifeless words.”
―Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose 1950-1976
“Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.”
―Virginia Woolf, The Waves
“A breath about nothing. A drift in the god. A wind.”
―Rainer M. Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus I-3
“What was after the universe?
Nothing.
―James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
