Ellen Hopkins Quotes

The emptiness was intense, like the stillness in a great factory when the machinery stops running.

The house clock, place certain there at the bottom of things, strikes the half hour dry and null. All is so much, all is so deep, all is so dark and cold!

It's the silence I imagine in the rest of the world, the silence of an endless ocean and uninhabitable island, a silence that can be seen from space.

So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight - watching over nothing.

Not a living thing was to be seen and the cottages that sat huddled close to the ground remained fast shut; the smoke from the chimneys alone still gave a sign of life.

Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.

The enormous lake stretched flat and smooth and white all the way to the edge of the gray sky. Wagon tracks went away across it, so far that you could not see where they went; they ended in nothing at all.

For a long time now my heart has had its shutters closed, its steps deserted, formerly a tumultuous hotel, but now empty and echoing like a great empty tomb.

I'm completely uninhabited.

As I followed Margo's directions through the maze of one-way streets, we saw a few people sleeping on the sidewalk or sitting on benches, but nobody was moving. Margo rolled down the window, and I felt the thick air blow across my face, warmer than night ought to be. I glanced over and saw strands of her hair blowing all around her face. Even though I could see her there, I felt entirely alone among these big and empty buildings, like I'd survived the apocalypse and the world had been given to me, this whole and amazing and endless world, mine for the exploring.

Earth, left silent by the wind of night,Seems shrunken 'neath the gray unmeasured height.

Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful.

Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

A picture of my existence... would show a useless wooden stake covered in snow... stuck loosely at a slant in the ground in a ploughed field on the edge of a vast open plain on a dark winter night.

Eternity is a glorious word, but eternity is ice.

He could not feel her near him in the darkness nor hear her voice touch his ear. He waited for some minutes listening. He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.

Except for the sound of the rain, on the road, on the roofs, on the umbrella, there was absolute silence: only the dying moan of the sirens continued for a moment or two to vibrate within the ear. It seemed to Scobie later that this was the ultimate border he had reached in happiness: being in darkness, alone, with the rain falling, without love or pity.

When friendship disappears then there is a space left open to that awful loneliness of the outside world which is like the cold space between the planets. It is an air in which men perish utterly.

It's a terrible feeling being lonely.

It is not a life at all. It is a reticence, in three volumes.

It's lonely and cold on the top... lonely and cold.

You are forever alone.

If you study my paintings, there are no signs of human life.

Antarctica is otherworldly, like nothing I've ever seen before. Stark, cold, beautiful desolation.

A desert is a place without expectation.