“So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end -- not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly _______ heart. "― Brian Doyle, One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder for the Spiritual and Nonspiritual Alike

“She wanted to be herself again, to recover all that she had been obliged to give up in half a century of servitude that had doubtless made her happy but which, once her husband was dead, did not leave her even the ______ of her identity.”― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“She was night itself reborn on earth, a queen ______ in shadows.”― Claire Legrand, Furyborn

She rejoins the crowd and watches with her friends, but she feels like an emptied glass - that ______ feeling of walking out from a movie theatre in the middle of the day, out from the intimate matinée darkness and the smell of popcorn, which is the smell of heightened colour and sound and story, into the borderless bright of day. Bereft.”― Ann-Marie MacDonald, The Way the Crow Flies

“The rat, huddled in the hollow of her palms, squeaked glumly. Delighted, she hugged him to her chest. "Oh poor baby," she ______, almost as if he really were a pet. "Poor Simon, it'll be fine, I promise-"― Cassandra Clare, City of Bones

“How come the Muggles don’t hear the bus?” said Harry.“Them!” said Stan _________. “Don’ listen properly, do they? Don’ look properly either. Never notice nuffink, they don’.”― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

"If you read a book, or shuffle a deck of cards, or care for a dog, you are avoiding yourself. The _______ of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all. If it were otherwise, men would never have bothered to make an alphabet, nor to have fashioned words out of what were only animal sounds, nor to have crossed continents - each man to see what the other looked like.”― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“The Death Mist is not for helping!" Akhlys shrieked. "It ______ mortals in misery as their souls pass into the Underworld. It is the very breath of Tartarus, of death, of despair!""Awesome," Percy said. "Could we get two orders of that to go?”― Rick Riordan, The House of Hades

“Now she knew living was just a brief _______, a blip really, in the infinite line of nothingness that composed that shadowy realm of the unknown. It could stop at any time.”― Nenia Campbell, Terrorscape