Hollow Men Quotes

“And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.”
― T. S. Eliot

“He’s a hollow man, he believes in nothing. Hollow men are vulnerable to anyone who offers them something that might fill the void and make them feel less empty.”
― Dean Koontz, From the Corner of His Eye

“See behind the curtain. Tear aside the veil. See reality. See things as they really are. See the naked lunch on the end of your fork. Do you have the stomach for it? Fuck the bland. Fuck the Ignavi. If the game of life is too tough for you, get to fuck. Life is not a spectator sport. Make a difference or lie down and let the world trample you into the ground. This is no country for hollow men.”
― Thomas Stark, The Book of Thought: Mind Matters

“The world has become a planetary Nozick Experience Machine, mediated by the ubiquitous smartphone. Everyone is plugged in, desperate for their pleasure fix, for their likes, their approvals. They have become addicted to hyperreality, yet hyperreality is soulless. It can’t satisfy exactly because it lacks, well, reality. You have been told you can have it all, you can have the perfect life. You can’t. However, you can be presented with images and experiences as if you had achieved it all. But you haven’t. You have to buy into the fantasy, but deep down there’s something missing. What is missing is you. You yourself have become hyperreal, which means you have lost the real you, and nothing can make up for the loss of yourself. You have become fixed to your persona, your mask, and now there is nothing beneath the mask. When you take the mask off at the end of an exhausting day of faking it, there’s no real face underneath, just a faked face, or a blank space. We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men. Mistah Kurtz, he dead.”
― Mark Romel, The Seer of Unreality: The Hyperreality Wars