blank quotes

This world's no blot for us Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good: To find its meaning is my meat and drink.

- Robert Browning
  Men and Women,'Fra Lippo Lippi'.

Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong woman the man, many thousand years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order.

-Thomas Hardy
Tess of the D'Urbervilles, ch.11.

A third-rate political wheel-horse, with the face of a moving-picture actor, the intelligence of a respectable agricultural implement dealer, and the imagination of a lodge joiner†a benign blanka decent, harmless, laborious, hollow-headed mediocrity.

- H(enry) L(ouis) Mencken
Of President  Warren G Harding. Quoted in Fred Hobson Mencken:  A Life (1994).

Thus with the year Seasons return, but not to me returns Day, or the sweet approach of ev'n or morn, Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose, Or flocks, or herds, of human face divine; But cloud instead, and ever-during dark Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair Presented with a universal blank Of nature's works to me expunged and razed, And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.

-John Milton
  Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.3, l.40^50.

Now, in this blank of things, a harmony, Home-felt, and home-created, comes to heal That grief for which the senses still supply Fresh food.

-William Wordsworth
  'Calm is all nature as a resting wheel',1.7^10. Published in the Morning Post,13 Feb.1802.