Best 381 quotes in «melancholy quotes» category

(The rain and the smell of night pulled at me. Confused me.) Everything means a choice, she had said, getting one thing and losing one. The love still held me, but all at once I could, despite the rain, admit to myself what I really wanted was this clarity.

There can be few places more conducive to the quiet, solitary contemplation of melancholy thoughts than a window-seat; and if beyond the window-panes there is a steely vignette of November murk and withered twigs, so much the better.

There is, following an ample meal, a sort of pause in time, filled with a gentle slackening of thought and energy, when to sit doing nothing gives us a sense of life's richness and a feeling that the least effort would be intolerable. The melancholy we took with us to table has disappeared and, if we think of it at all it is only to smile, as at some black mood now past, its cause having gone. And with the melancholy, all scruple, all remorse departs from us.

There's a lot of beauty to be found in sadness and melancholia. One of the things that you find time and time again - not just with music, but with literature - is that things that appear to be quite depressing on the surface can ironically be very uplifting and touching to other people. When you hear something that really reminds you that you're not alone in feeling sad, depressed, melancholic, angry - I think that can actually be a very cathartic experience.

There was this constant urge in me to tear my insides apart, I didn't know why. By the time I made my mind that it was impossible for me to do, there alighted the fear, haunting me with the words that rang constantly in my head, "You're not brave enough". I didn't feel devastated, I felt the urge to be devastated.

The Sad Boy Ay, his old mother was a glad one. And his poor old father was a mad one. The two begot this sad one. Alas for the single shoe The Sad Boy pulled out of the rank green pond, Fishing for fairies On the prankish advice Of two disagreeable lovers of small boys. Pity the unfortunate Sad Boy With a single magic shoe And a pair of feet And an extra foot With no shoe for it. This was how the terrible hopping began That wore the Sad Boy thin and through To his only shoe And started the great fright in the provinces above Brent Where the Sad Boy became half of himself To match the beautiful boot He had dripped from the green pond. Wherever he went weeping and hopping And stamping and sobbing, Pounding a whole earth into a half-heaven, Things split where he stood Into the left side for the left magic, Into no side for the missing right boot. Mercy be to the Sad Boy Scamping exasperated After a wide boot To double the magic Of a limping foot. Mercy to the melancholy folk On the Sad Boy's right. It was not for want of wandering He lost the left boot too And the knowledge of his left side, But because one awful Sunday This dear boy dislimbed Went back to the old pond To fish up another shoe And was quickly (being too light for his line) Fished in. Gracious how he kicks now All the little ripples up! The quiet population of Brent has settled down, And the perfect surface of the famous pond Is slightly pocked, marked with three signs, For visitors come to fish for souvenirs, Where the Sad Boy went in And his glad mother and his mad father after him.

The sick constriction of the heart was undeniable; there was a melancholy truth in the fact that it was suffering which made me, I thought, at last real to myself.

The sound of the tumblers in the locks of your apartment door puts you in mind of dungeons. The place is haunted. Just this morning you found a makeup brush beside the toilet. Memories lurk like dustballs at the backs of drawers. The stereo is a special model that plays only music fraught with poignant associations.

The staying awake was a great self-sacrificaing gesture of friendship, and wonderfully in keeping with our current mood of intense friendship and religious fervour. We were all in a state of shock. We engaged in a long Dostojevskyan conversations and drank one black coffee after another. It was sort of night typical of youth, the sort you only can look back on with shame and embarassment once you've grown up. But God knows, I must have grown up already by then, because I don't feel the slightest embarassment when I think back to it, just a terrible nostalgia.

The words sounded like a mournful incantation.

They’re in southern France. Oldest paintings ever found there. We’re talking like thirty thousand years old. Scenes typical of the Paleolithic—horses, cattle, mammoths, that kind of thing. No pictures of humans but one depiction of a vagina, for what that’s worth. The really interesting thing is what happened when they carbon-dated the place. They found pictures in the same room painted six thousand years apart. They looked identical.” “Okay. So?” “So think about that. For six thousand years there was no progress and no evidence of any impulse to change anything. People were fine with the way things were. In other words, this is not a people experiencing spiritual desolation. You and I need new diversions nightly. These people didn’t change a thing for sixty centuries. This is not a people tired of their snack routine.” The drumming outside escalates for a moment and then fades “back into a kind of ominous tolling. “Melancholy,” Periwinkle says, “had to be invented. Civilization had this unintended side effect, which is melancholy. Tedium. Routine. Gloom. And when those things were birthed, so were people like me, to attend to them. So no, it’s not patriotism. It’s evolution.

They wanted a list of symptoms: dizziness, blurred vision, palpitations. You could not say, it is a different life trying to nudge this one aside. I am meant to be living that different life. Who would understand that, if she could make no better sense of understanding it herself?

To be happy to be sad and sad to be happy is to sing an echo in that beautiful language called Sorrow.

Today I have come for a duel. Let's see which is greater - your depth or the depth of my sorrows.

Tom began screaming, and I wondered if the baby's soft brain was, in this moment, changing shape in response to the violent stimuli. I tried to intellectualize the noise to protect the baby's psyche. I whispered: Isn't that interesting to hear a man scream? Doesn't that challenge our stereotypes of what men can do? And then I tried, Shhhhhhhhh.

To this day when I inhale a light scent of Wrangler—its sweet sharpness—or the stronger, darker scent of Musk, I return to those hours and it ceases to be just cologne that I take in but the very scent of age, of youth at its most beautiful peak. It bears the memory of possibility, of unknown forests, unchartered territories, and a heart light and skipping, hell-bent as the captain of any of the three ships, determined at all costs to prevail to the new world. Turning back was no option. Whatever the gales, whatever the emaciation, whatever the casualty to self, onward I kept my course. My heart felt the magnetism of its own compass guiding me on—its direction constant and sure. There was no other way through. I feel it again as once it had been, before it was broken-in; its strength and resolute ardency. The years of solitude were nothing compared to what lay ahead. In sailing for the horizon that part of my life had been sealed up, a gentle eddy, a trough of gentle waves diminishing further, receding away. Whatever loneliness and pain went with the years between the ages of 14 and 20, was closed, irretrievable—I was already cast in form and direction in a certain course. When I open the little bottle of eau de toilette five hundred different days unfold within me, conversations so strained, breaking slowly, so painstakingly, to a comfortable place. A place so warm and inviting after the years of silence and introspect, of hiding. A place in the sun that would burn me alive before I let it cast a shadow on me. Until that time I had not known, I had not been conscious of my loneliness. Yes, I had been taciturn in school, alone, I had set myself apart when others tried to engage. But though I was alone, I had not felt the pangs of loneliness. It had not burdened or tormented as such when I first felt the clear tang of its opposite in the form of another’s company. Of Regn’s company. We came, each in our own way, in our own need—listening, wanting, tentatively, as though we came upon each other from the side in spite of having seen each other head on for two years. It was a gradual advance, much again like a vessel waiting for its sails to catch wind, grasping hold of the ropes and learning much too quickly, all at once, how to move in a certain direction. There was no practicing. It was everything and all—for the first and last time. Everything had to be right, whether it was or not. The waters were beautiful, the work harder than anything in my life, but the very glimpse of any tempest of defeat was never in my line of vision. I’d never failed at anything. And though this may sound quite an exaggeration, I tell you earnestly, it is true. Everything to this point I’d ever set my mind to, I’d achieved. But this wasn’t about conquering some land, nor had any of my other desires ever been about proving something. It just had to be—I could not break, could not turn or retract once I’d committed myself to my course. You cannot force a clock to run backwards when it is made to persevere always, and ever, forward. Had I not been so young I’d never have had the courage to love her.

Tristeţi Îmi port ca pe-un copil bolnav tristeţea,  prin parcu-n care frunzele, asemeni clopotelor plâng; şi-aud cum creşte neliniştea începutului de toamnă departe, şi cum aleargă păsările ploii, pe acoperişuri negre şi se frâng. E-aceeaşi amintire şi-aceeaşi deznădejde veche. Aş vrea cu braţele tale de astă-vară sa mă cuprinzi; păşesc pe urmele trecutului nostru, cum aş merge după un om cunoscut,  şi totuşi, nu-ţi mai găsesc gestul, în lacul cu mohorâte oglinzi. E pretutindeni, un aer apăsător, ca de spital,  şi pomii în despletiri, îşi spun mâhniri ştiute. Amintirea ta îmi închide drumul ca un mal,  şi-mi simt gândurile, în pietrişul umed, căzute. Aşa : vino să-mi ridici sufletul, ca pe-o coajă de copac,  şi să-mi citeşti durerile închise – cuiburi de păsări triste, acolo. Mâinile tale sa-mi fie deznădejdii, mătăsoase batiste,  şi ochii tăi, pentru copilul tristeţelor mele, odihnitor hamac,  Vântul răscoleşte cerul ca pe-o carte deschisă. Aud fâsâitul foilor pe care-s scrise atâtea poveşti dureroase. ... De departe vine prevestirea unui sfârşit apăsător,  şi eu îmi port tristeţea ca pe-un copil, prin săli de spital reci si întunecoase.

Voi rakkaani sydän on kylmä ja sammalta käteni kasvaa Minun reiteni mullassa hajoovat maaksi Ja haudalla risti jo lahona on. Olen maa. Olen maa johon tahdot.

Waking up breaks my heart. Getting dressed breaks my arms. Joining the crowd breaks my legs. Letting someone in...does me in.

We are inside soft, sweet and pure white despair.

We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan, Grayed in, and gray.

There is something so enchanting in the smile of melancholy. It is a ray of light in the darkness, a shade between sadness and despair, showing the possibility of consolation.

There's a special quality to the loneliness of dusk, a melancholy more brooding even than the night's.

There's no comfort, it seems, in the world of objects.

The soulless have no need of melancholia

The whole composition reminds him of something he once had and that he isn't sure if he misses. He does and he doesn't at the same time. It is less the melancholy memory of an abscence and more the comforting evidence that it exists and is still part of the world.

This is where Mother and I differ greatly. Her advice in the face of melancholy is: "Think about all the suffering in the world and be thankful you're not part of it." My advice is: "Go outside, to the country, enjoy the sun and all nature has to offer. Go outside and try to recapture the happiness within yourself; think of all the beauty in yourself and in everything around you and be happy." I don't think Mother's advice can be right, because what are you supposed to do if you become part of the suffering? You'd be completely lost. On the contrary, beauty remains, even in misfortune. If you just look for it, you discover more and more happiness and regain your balance. A person who's happy will make others happy; a person who has courage and faith will never die in misery!

This was a characteroloical prelude, but it wasn’t chemical or somatic. It was the anatomy of melancholy, not the anatomy of his brain.

To die, - To sleep, - To sleep! Perchance to dream: - ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there's the respect That makes calamity of so long life;

To keep something, you must take care of it. More, you must understand just what sort of care it requires. You must know the rules and abide by them. She could do that. She had been doing it all the months, in the writing of her letters to him. There had been rules to be learned in that matter, and the first of them was the hardest: never say to him what you want him to say to you. Never tell him how sadly you miss him, how it grows no better, how each day without him is sharper than the day before. Set down for him the gay happenings about you, bright little anecdotes, not invented, necessarily, but attractively embellished. Do not bedevil him with the pinings of your faithful heart because he is your husband, your man, your love. For you are writing to none of these. You are writing to a soldier.

To muse for long unwearied hours with my attention riveted to some frivolous device upon the margin, or in the typography of a book — to become absorbed for the better part of a summer's day in a quaint shadow falling aslant upon the tapestry, or upon the floor — to lose myself for an entire night in watching the steady flame of a lamp, or the embers of a fire — to dream away whole days over the perfume of a flower — to repeat monotonously some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind — to lose all sense of motion or physical existence in a state of absolute bodily quiescence long and obstinately persevered in — Such were a few of the most common and least pernicious vagaries induced by a condition of the mental faculties, not, indeed, altogether unparalleled, but certainly bidding defiance to any thing like analysis or explanation.

Under the glass porte-cochère of a theatre Amory stood, watching the first great drops of rain splatter down and flatten to dark stains on the sidewalk. The air became grey and opalescent; a solitary light suddenly outlined a window over the way; then another light; then a hundred more danced and glimmered into vision. Under his feet a thick, iron-studded skylight turned yellow; in the street the lamps of the taxicabs sent out glistening sheens along the already black pavement. The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day’s last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.

Und man hat niemand und nichts und faehrt in der Welt herum mit einem Koffer und mit einer Bücherkiste und eigentlich ohne Neugierde.

Unlike depression, melancholy does not have a specific cause. It is an aspect of temperament, perhaps genetically based. One may emerge from the hypo, as Lincoln did, but melancholy is an indelible part of one's nature.

Veiled melancholy has her sovereign shrine

We are sometimes dragged into a pit of unhappiness by someone else’s opinion that we do not look happy.

Well, here I am, just come home; a fellow gone to the bad; though I had the best intentions in the world at one time. Now I am melancholy mad, what with drinking and one thing and another.

We [of Thelema] are whole-hearted extroverts; the penalty of restricting oneself is anything from neurosis to down right lunacy; in particular, melancholia.

What broke your heart so bad That you had to close every door, That you say you have a dark soul And can't utter the word 'love' anymore?

We're just two lost souls Swimming in a fish bowl, Year after year, Running over the same old ground. What have we found? The same old fears. Wish you were here.

What came first _ the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music?

What if you are just destined to get hurt, to be helplessly stuck in a point of time you no longer want to be? Maybe life is all about trying to get up while you fall a little bit deeper in the pits of hell, each time you try not to...

What if you wake up one fine morning only to realize that the life you have been living since the last few days was nothing but a dream of yours? Would you go back to sleep then? I wake up each morning only to realize you're not by my side. And if this emptiness is nothing but a nightmare, let me wake up and go back to the time we were together...

What was wrong with you?" "Melancholy. Nothing more or less than that. I have suffered it often. Not because I do not like the court, but because... well, I do not know why. It is just one of those things... This time was particularly bad, though. It was so strong it was like a physical illness. But the doctors said it was melancholy, just melancholy, and that time away would it. 'A fragile disposition,' they called me.... As though one needs to be fragile to be sad.

When exactly did I give myself over to sleep? When did I stop resisting...? I used to be so lively, I was always wide awake — but when was that?

When I was young and filled with folly, I fell in love with melancholy

When the netted fence of spiderwebs that darkens my ruined house can hold the wind in its strands- that's when these troubled thoughts will blow away. . . .

When you get abandoned by someone, that's the moment when you've truly lost faith in them.

Where is the happiness, the sunshine, where are those thick skittles of wood which crashed and bounced so nicely, where is my bicycle with the low handlebars and the big gear? It seems there's a law which says that nothing ever vanishes, that matter is indestructible; therefore the chips from my skittles and the spokes of my bicycle still exist somewhere to this day. The pity of it is that I'll never find them again - never.

Why is Melancholy like Honey? Because it is very sweet, and it is culled from Flowers.