he was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted

But it’s no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life.

What? says Alf.

Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.

“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