Best 381 quotes in «melancholy quotes» category

Her love was like lavender, delicate and melancholy.

Her thoughts were like the moon eclipsing the sun.

Her voice was soft and numinous, as befitted any Aizian singer, yet it was not just bells and melody. There was something else in her tune, a strand of solemnity that no Aizian could possess, for it yearned for something far away, whereas Aizians needed only open their eyes to behold the greatest wonders. Yes, she was in Aizai now, but she hadn’t always been, and for how much longer was impossible to say.

Her wave was quite cheerful. But I didn't really want to see her again, if possible.

...her own restless coveting of his love and the slow but sure ebullience of her desire for him; then the Nawab's martydom and her spiritual homelessness and physical loneliness; there was so much, so many portraits and landscapes, like the bright pages of an album of words and pictures. They filled her heart overflowing with the tangy, coppery taste of blood that flows from failure, and pricked her soul with nostalgia, for what was and what could have been. She had never thought that happy memories could come accompanied with so much regret, so much pain, so much repining, and discontent. If you plucked a rose without due care, its thorn pricked you to protest the thoughtlessness and the inconsiderateness you had displayed in taking away its crowning glory. Here, it was nothing else but the rose which was the thorn: its each and every petal was saturated with the scents of the past but it stung like the scorpion plant. But was it possible not to touch those memories? For their scents traveled in and out of your being like breath, and their colours were inside every blink of your eye.

He sank back into his black-and-white world, his immobile world of inanimate drawings that had been granted the secret of motion, his death-world with its hidden gift of life. But that life was a deeply ambiguous life, a conjurer's trick, a crafty illusion based on an accidental property of the retina, which retained an image for a fraction of a second after the image was no longer present. On this frail fact was erected the entire structure of the cinema, that colossal confidence game. The animated cartoon was a far more honest expression of the cinematic illusion than the so-called realistic film, because the cartoon reveled in its own illusory nature, exulted in the impossible--indeed it claimed the impossible as its own, exalted it as its own highest end, found in impossibility, in the negation of the actual, its profoundest reason for being. The animated cartoon was nothing but the poetry of the impossible--therein lay its exhilaration and its secret melancholy. For this willful violation of the actual, while it was an intoxicating release from the constriction of things, was at the same time nothing but a delusion, an attempt to outwit mortality. As such it was doomed to failure. And yet it was desperately important to smash through the constriction of the actual, to unhinge the universe and let the impossible stream in, because otherwise--well, otherwise the world was nothing but an editorial cartoon.

He saw her red eyes filled with tears of anger. "Tell me why this rage?" He asked holding her in his arms. "Why do you fence for yourself so much? She sighed and muttered, "Because all I really want is nothing but to be proved wrong.

He was the great love of her life you know.' 'Oh, dulling,' said my mother, sadly, 'One always thinks that. Every, every time.

His day, usually a jelly-like creature, a shapeless, spineless thing, had attained Mesozoic structure. It was marching along surely, even jauntily, toward a climax, as a play should, as a day should. He dreaded the moment when the backbone of the day should be broken, when he should have met the girl at last, talked to her, and then bowed her laughter out the door, returning only to the melancholy dregs in the teacups and the gathering staleness of the uneaten sandwiches.

His life cries for an unknown land of joy; where sadness lingers between border lines His discolored steps towards the decoy misconstrued as the mystery declines From the poem Sonnet For A Man (Part II)

His jaw was slack and his mouth open, and he wondered if perhaps he would drown eventually; drowned by the falling rain.

Holy things and holy places, out of mind under the cauterizing brilliance of the summer son, reared up now as the winter sun struck from the south, casting shadows coldly upon the avenues where the people followed and went in, wearing winter hearts on their sleeves for the plucking.

Honour looked so much like a child herself, confined to bed, a white nightgown, like one of those maudlin Victorian dolls. Her cheeks were red, like someone had painted them, but I knew it was from rubbing, wiping away her melancholy.

How long does a person wait before they let go of the one they love?

How I hate everything!

How indescribable the scent of autumn flowers was– barely a scent at all, really; just a faint, strange smell, pleasant but sad. Could a smell be sad or was it just the association with the dying summer?

I am Broken single mother Disconnected lover Slow motion dresser Dark secret confessor White flag trend Professional dead end

I am speaking of the evenings when the sun sets early, of the fathers under the streetlamps in the back streets returning home carrying plastic bags. Of the old Bosphorus ferries moored to deserted stations in the middle of winter, where sleepy sailors scrub the decks, pail in hand and one eye on the black-and-white television in the distance; of the old booksellers who lurch from one ϧnancial crisis to the next and then wait shivering all day for a customer to appear; of the barbers who complain that men don’t shave as much after an economic crisis; of the children who play ball between the cars on cobblestoned streets; of the covered women who stand at remote bus stops clutching plastic shopping bags and speak to no one as they wait for the bus that never arrives; of the empty boathouses of the old Bosphorus villas; of the teahouses packed to the rafters with unemployed men; of the patient pimps striding up and down the city’s greatest square on summer evenings in search of one last drunken tourist; of the broken seesaws in empty parks; of ship horns booming through the fog; of the wooden buildings whose every board creaked even when they were pashas’ mansions, all the more now that they have become municipal headquarters; of the women peeking through their curtains as they wait for husbands who never manage to come home in the evening; of the old men selling thin religious treatises, prayer beads, and pilgrimage oils in the courtyards of mosques; of the tens of thousands of identical apartment house entrances, their facades discolored by dirt, rust, soot, and dust; of the crowds rushing to catch ferries on winter evenings; of the city walls, ruins since the end of the Byzantine Empire; of the markets that empty in the evenings; of the dervish lodges, the tekkes, that have crumbled; of the seagulls perched on rusty barges caked with moss and mussels, unϩinching under the pelting rain; of the tiny ribbons of smoke rising from the single chimney of a hundred-yearold mansion on the coldest day of the year; of the crowds of men ϧshing from the sides of the Galata Bridge; of the cold reading rooms of libraries; of the street photographers; of the smell of exhaled breath in the movie theaters, once glittering aϱairs with gilded ceilings, now porn cinemas frequented by shamefaced men; of the avenues where you never see a woman alone after sunset; of the crowds gathering around the doors of the state-controlled brothels on one of those hot blustery days when the wind is coming from the south; of the young girls who queue at the doors of establishments selling cut-rate meat; of the holy messages spelled out in lights between the minarets of mosques on holidays that are missing letters where the bulbs have burned out; of the walls covered with frayed and blackened posters; of the tired old dolmuşes, ϧfties Chevrolets that would be museum pieces in any western city but serve here as shared taxis, huϫng and puϫng up the city’s narrow alleys and dirty thoroughfares; of the buses packed with passengers; of the mosques whose lead plates and rain gutters are forever being stolen; of the city cemeteries, which seem like gateways to a second world, and of their cypress trees; of the dim lights that you see of an evening on the boats crossing from Kadıköy to Karaköy; of the little children in the streets who try to sell the same packet of tissues to every passerby; of the clock towers no one ever notices; of the history books in which children read about the victories of the Ottoman Empire and of the beatings these same children receive at home; of the days when everyone has to stay home so the electoral roll can be compiled or the census can be taken; of the days when a sudden curfew is announced to facilitate the search for terrorists and everyone sits at home fearfully awaiting “the oϫcials”; CONTINUED IN SECOND PART OF THE QUOTE

I am - yet what I am none cares or knows; My friends forsake me like a memory lost: I am the self-consumer of my woes- They rise and vanish in oblivious host Like shadows in love's frenzied stifled throes And yet I am, and live - like vapours tossed

I close my eyes and listen to the ocean. I'm thinking about sailing, to England or maybe France. The way the wind would feel on my face and the sound of his voice screaming my name through his laughter. The waves would crash like applause. God, I remember when I used to be afraid of the ocean.

I "dated" one boy and our song was "Faithfully" by Journey. Every time it played my body would turn electric, and I would stare out whatever window I was near and reminisce about experiences I hadn't had. Is there a word for when you are young and pretending to have lived and loved a thousand lives? Is there a German word for that? Seems like there should be. Let's say it is Schaufenfrieglasploit.

I don't mean to sound like a spoiled brat. I know that into every sunny life a little rain must fall and all that, but in my case, the crisis-level hysteria is an all-too-recurring theme. The voices inside my head, which I used to think were just passing through, seem to have taken up residence And I've been on these goddamn pills for years.

I felt lonely, and in full possession of my loneliness. It was the first time I had owned anything of value.

I felt less unhappy than usual because her melancholy expression, the way the vivid colour of her dress almost cut her off from the rest of the world, made her seem somehow lonely and unhappy, and I found this reassuring.

If you close your eyes when you sing in Latin, and if you stand right at the back so you can keep one hand against the cold stone wall of the church, you can pretend you're in the Middle Ages. That's why I did it. That's what I was in it for.

If you saw a wounded person, torn and mangled, on the highway, the sight of so deplorable an object would fill you with compassion; the sight of your friends under the disease I am now speaking ought to move you much more, for it is tearing them to pieces every moment. Every moment it preys upon their vitals, and they are continually dying, yet cannot die.

I'll use the blood from my spilling heart to write the words that were never able to slip out of my mouth, so you can see how much you've broken me into a perpetual state of melancholy.

I love death because life hates me.

I loved him the way some people are to be loved - from a distance.

In all other evils people take for granted what others say, and sympathize accordingly with them; but in this one people are apt to contradict and oppose those who are distressed—and as long as they do so, they cannot pity them as they ought. This makes the grief of such to overwhelm and strangle them within, because, when they disclose it, they find it is to no purpose. In this case, do as you would have others do unto you. Suppose that you have a toothache or a headache, and, when you complain of those ailments, people were to tell you that it was nothing but a fancy; would you not think their carriage to be full of cruelty? And would it not vex you to find out that you cannot be believed?

In any case, there was only one tunnel, dark and lonely, mine, the tunnel in which I had spent my childhood, my youth, my whole life. And in one of those transparent lengths of the stone wall I had seen this girl and had gullibly believed that she was traveling another tunnel parallel to mine, when in reality she belonged to the broad world, to the world without confines of those who do not live in tunnels; and perhaps she had peeped into one of my strange windows out of curiosity and had caught a glimpse of my doomed loneliness, or her fancy had been intrigued by the mute language, the clue of my painting. And then, while I advanced always along my corridor, she lived her normal life outside, the exciting life of those people who live outside, that strange, absurd life in which there are dances and parties and gaiety and frivolity. And it happened at times that when I walked by one of my windows she was waiting for me, silent and longing (why was she waiting for me? why silent and longing?); but other times she did not get there on time, or she forgot about this poor creature hemmed in, and then I, with my face pressed against the glass wall, could see her in the distance, smiling or dancing carefree, or, what was worse, I could not see her at all and I imagined her in inaccessible or vile places. And then I felt my destiny a far lonelier one than I had imagined.

I needed a time machine. I needed to run around the past and gather up all the old, unbroken parts of me and try to Frankenstein myself back together again. My healthy body, my unjaded sixteen-year-old heart, my baby brain. I may not make such a pretty monster, but at least I'd feel like myself again.

In her eyes shone the sweetness of melancholy.

In Hong Kong, I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Love in the Time of Cholera”, in which the hero must wait until his seventies before being united with his beloved. In a moment of Melancholy, I inscribed my copy: Angelina, I will love you always. Adam and sent it to her, via Jacinta. It was an unhealthy book for me to have read at that time, and to have then inflicted on Angelina. Just wait long enough and somehow the right people will die. The starts will align, we’ll get over ourselves and we’ll be together. And in the meantime, what?

In old prints melancholy is usually portrayed as a woman, disheveled, deranged, surrounded by broken pitchers, leaning casks, torn books. She may be sunk in unpeaceful sleep, heavy limbed, overpowered by her inability to take the world's measure, her compass and book laid aside. She is very frightening, but the person she frightens most is herself. She is her own disease. Miter shows her wearing a large ungainly dress, winged, a garland in her tangled hair. She has a fierce frown and so great is her disarray that she is closed in by emblems of study, duty, and suffering: a bell, an hourglass, a pair of scales, a globe, a compass, a ladder, nails. Sometimes this woman is shown surrounded by encroaching weeds, a conweb undisturbed above her head. Sometimes she gazes out of the window at a full moon for she is moonstruck. And should melancholy strike a man it will because he is suffering from romantic love: he will lean his padded satin arm on a velvet cushion and gaze skywards under the nodding plume of his hat, or he will grasp a thorn or a nettle and indicate that he does not sleep. These men seem to me to be striking a bit of a pose, unlike women, whose melancholy is less picturesque. The women look as if they are in the grip of an affliction too serious to be put into words. The men, on the other hand, appear to have dressed up for the occasion, and are anxious to put a noble face on their suffering. Which shows that nothing much has changed since the sixteenth century at least in that respect.

In the period of my life that Fred and I had this conversation I was writing a thesis at Melbourne University as part of a masters in creative writing, entitled Melancholy Ever After, about the effect of melancholy on narrative structure in fairy tales.

I often wish I'd got on better with your father,' he said. But he never liked anyone who--our friends,' said Clarissa; and could have bitten her tongue for thus reminding Peter that he had wanted to marry her. Of course I did, thought Peter; it almost broke my heart too, he thought; and was overcome with his own grief, which rose like a moon looked at from a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from the sunken day. I was more unhappy than I've ever been since, he thought. And as if in truth he were sitting there on the terrace he edged a little towards Clarissa; put his hand out; raised it; let it fall. There above them it hung, that moon. She too seemed to be sitting with him on the terrace, in the moonlight.

I, sometimes, fear that probably I'll just keep changing cities, and may be someday I'll also travel the world, but never find another soul who thinks exactly the way I do.

I stood there silently, under the cold embrace of that rain, and watched myself drown, as all of that sadness soaked itself onto me, It did not wash away my sorrows, nor did it comfort me, it just gave in to me, like a falling leaf gives in to the ground, filling my chest with all the sorrows, of both tomorrow and yesterday, it broke something in me, something i once cherished, and without that torn self, i often ask myself, i wonder, what's worse ?? To lose one's own self? or to lose one's own reason to live ....

I can barely conceive a type of beauty in which there is no melancholy.

If ever again, someone says to go to the market, where hearts are sold in exchange for melancholy souls, never would I go. Never would I wait, if ever again someone says— not to.

I felt my throat tighten and constrict. My hearts ached with a pain I could not describe. I wondered if I were dying. I felt not sadness. I felt pity. For myself. For us all. We were children no longer. And we never would be again.

If you tell someone you have depression, they will often say, "Oh, I've been depressed before, too." The difference lies between being depressed and having depression. Everyone's been depressed at one time or another, but these are far from being the same things. One is a passing mood. The other is a chronic illness that does not come and go, ebb and flow, is here one day and gone the next. The difference between being depressed and having depression is that one is a mood and the other is an illness. One is a momentary bout of melancholy. The other is a debilitating condition that requires medical treatment. Would you feel better about having a cancerous lesion if I likened it to the rash I had last week? The difference between being depressed and having depression is the difference between a mood that will soon pass, and a serious illness that disrupts your ability to function and will take years to treat. The difference between being depressed and having depression is the difference between Cleveland and Bangkok, or your frying pan and the surface of the sun. So, no, we (depressives) do not feel better when you tell us about your rash. We'll do our best to be polite about it, but no, it really doesn't help at all.

i have laughed more than daffodils and cried more than June.

Ik wil liggen in een karmozijnen kamerjas, afgezet met konijnenbont, die over de randen van mijn chaise longue heen en weer golft op de knus krakende vloer van oud hout, dat nooit meer zal werken, in het woonvertrek, dat mijn oude, betrouwbare butler zo warm stookt dat mijn gedachten smelten als de sneeuwvlokken tegen de buitenkant van de vuile ramen. En daar wil,ik toeven, in de zacht knisperende schemer van durende tijd die van geen uur wil weten, waar droombeelden voorbijglijden als handen over ogen, als schaduwen over de muur. De oude boter is nog goed. Ik kan hem eten met rijstvelden suiker. De krenten kunnen wellen in de ingekookte thee. Ik blaas de de vliegen weg. Terwijl ik wegdrijf in een halfslaap , krabtvde butler met een spateltje de bruine korsten van mijn voeten. 'Er is vandaag een brief gekomen,' zegt hij.' Maar niets om u zorgen over te maken. Ik heb hem ongeopend in de haard gegooid' ' ' Krijgen we bezoek?'' Ik zie het als mijn voornaamstectaakndat u rustig kan blijven slapen.

I'll always be your friend, Talltail. But I'm a kittypet and you're a warrior. You'll always be a Warrior.

Il n'arrivait às à trouver exactement son aplomb. Comme lorsqu'on déplace un meuble très lourd et qu'on n'arrive plus ensuite à faire coïncider sa base avec ses marques laissées au sol. Ou comme lorsqu'on n'arrive plus à replier une chemise comme l'avait fait la vendeuse. Les plis du tissu sont là, bien marqués, on les suit, mais le résultat n'est plus parfait, il est personnel.

I love rainstorms...the thunder, lightning, wind, all of it. So much going on at once, so many emotions...just like me.

In a world without melancholy, nightingales would start burping

In the park which surrounded our house were the ruins of the former mansion of Brentwood, a much smaller and less important house than the solid Georgian edifice which we inhabited. The ruins were picturesque, however, and gave importance to the place. Even we, who were but temporary tenants, felt a vague pride in them, as if they somehow reflected a certain consequence upon ourselves. The old building had the remains of a tower, an indistinguishable mass of mason-work, overgrown with ivy, and the shells of walls attached to this were half filled up with soil. I had never examined it closely, I am ashamed to say. There was a large room, or what had been a large room, with the lower part of the windows still existing, on the principal floor, and underneath other windows, which were perfect, though half filled up with fallen soil, and waving with a wild growth of brambles and chance growths of all kinds. This was the oldest part of all. At a little distance were some very commonplace and disjointed fragments of the building, one of them suggesting a certain pathos by its very commonness and the complete wreck which it showed. This was the end of a low gable, a bit of grey wall, all encrusted with lichens, in which was a common doorway. Probably it had been a servants' entrance, a backdoor, or opening into what are called "the offices" in Scotland. No offices remained to be entered-pantry and kitchen had all been swept out of being; but there stood the doorway open and vacant, free to all the winds, to the rabbits, and every wild creature. It struck my eye, the first time I went to Brentwood, like a melancholy comment upon a life that was over. A door that led to nothing - closed once perhaps with anxious care, bolted and guarded, now void of any meaning. It impressed me, I remember, from the first; so perhaps it may be said that my mind was prepared to attach to it an importance, which nothing justified. ("The Open Door")