Best 381 quotes in «melancholy quotes» category

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")

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 only wanted absolute quiet to think out why I had developed a sad attitude toward sadness, a melancholy attitude toward melancholy and a tragic attitude toward tragedy — why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion.

I realised I never wanted to leave her side, and I never wanted her to have to struggle to be released from her sadness. I could never suggest she required release; for she did not require release. It was a true thing, this sadness of hers; a true thing about the world, about life, about herself. I just wanted Daphne. I wanted who she was, how she was, only her, all of her, always. And I knew I would be forever treading the long path towards that shrouded chamber of dusky luminance I glimpsed in her flickering sort of half-smiles.

I see Barsad, and Cly, Defarge, The Vengeance, the Juryman, the Judge, long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of the old, perishing by this retributive instrument, before it shall cease out of its present use. I see a beautiful city and brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making explanation for itself and wearing it out. ” ― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities tags: charles-dickens 18 likes Like Charles Dickens “They said of him, about the city that night, that it was the peacefullest man's face ever beheld there. Many added that he looked sublime and prophetic. One of the most remarkable sufferers by the same axe---a woman---had asked at the foot of the same scaffold, not long before, to be allowed to write down the thoughts that were inspiring her. If he had given an utterance to his, and they were prophetic, they would have been these: "I see Barsad, and Cly, Defarge, The Vengeance, the Juryman, the Judge, long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of the old, perishing by this retributive instrument, before it shall cease out of its present use. I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out. "I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy, in that England which I shall see no more. I see Her with a child upon her bosom, who bears my name. I see her father, aged and bent, but otherwise restored, and faithful to all men in his healing office, and at peace. I see the good old man, so long their friend, in ten years' time enriching them with all he has, and passing tranquilly to his reward. "I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. I see her, an old woman weeping for me on the anniversary of this day. I see her and her husband, their course done, lying side by side in their last earthly bed, and I know that each was not more honoured and held sacred in the other's soul, than I was in the souls of both. "I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see him winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by the light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it, faded away. I see him, foremost of just judges and honoured men, brining a boy of my name, with a forehead that I know and golden hair, to this place---then fair to look upon, with not a trace of this day's disfigurement---and I hear him tell the child my story, with a tender and faltering voice. "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

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 sometimes think about old tombs and weeds That interwreathe among the bones of kings With cold and poisonous berry and black flower: Or ruminate upon the skulls of steeds Frailer than shells and on those luminous wings - The shoulder blades of Princes of fled power, Which now the unrecorded sandstorms grind Into so wraith-like a translucency Of tissue-thin and aqueous bone - A Reverie of Bone

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 then supped with my companions, with whom I was soon after to part for ever - always a most melancholly, death-like idea - a sort of separation of soul; for all the regret which follows those from whom fate separates us, seems to be something torn from ourselves.

It's my letter," she began. "I cannot make it right." "Come in, come in," the Prince said gently. "Maybe we can help you." She sat down in the same chair as before. "All right, I'll close my eyes and listen; read to me." " 'Westley, my passion, my sweet, my only, my own. Come back, come back. I shall kill myself otherwise. Yours in torment, Buttercup.' " She looked at Humperdinck. "Well? Do you think I'm throwing myself at him?" "It does seem a bit forward," the Prince admitted. "It doesn't leave him a great deal of room to maneuver.

I thought once how Theocritus had sung Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years, Who each one in a gracious hand appears To bear a gift for mortals, old or young; And, as I mused it in his antique tongue, I saw, in gradual vision through my tears, The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years, Those of my own life, who by turns had flung A shadow across me. Straightaway I was 'ware, So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair; And a voice said in mastery, while I strove,-- Guess now who holds thee?--Death, I said, But, there, The silver answer rang,--Not Death, but Love.

It might be high summer all about but inside me everything is fall. The lonesomeness of a sad, slow closing of days, knowing frost is nigh and wind needling through the cabin chinks is just around the bend. That's me, right now.

I thought I would marry my boyfriend and grow old and sick of him. I thought I would keep my friends, and we'd make different, new memories. None of that happened. Better things happened. Then why am I so sad?

I thundered hot water into the big tub, setting up McGee's Handy Home Treatment for Melancholy. A deep hot bath, and a strong cold drink, and a book on the tub rack. Who needs the Megrims? Surely not McGee, not that big brown loose-jointed, wirehaired beach rambler, that lazy fishcatching, girlwatching, grey-eyed iconoclastic hustler. Stay happy, McGee, while you use up the stockpiled cash. Borrow a Junior from Meyer for the sake of coziness. Or get dressed and go over to the next doc, over to the big Wheeler where the Alabama Tiger maintains his permanent floating house party and join the festive pack. Do anything, but stop remembering the way Sam Taggart looks with all the wandering burned out of him. Stop remembering the sly shy way Nicki would walk toward you, across a room. Stop remembering the way Lois died. Get in there and have fun, fella. While there's fun to have. While there's some left. Before they deal you out.

It is the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man, to tell him he is at the end of his nature; or that there is no further state to come, unto which this seems progressional, and otherwise made in vain. Without this accomplishment, the natural expectation and desire of such a state, were but a fallacy in nature; unsatisfied considerators would quarrel the justice of their constitutions, and rest content that Adam had fallen lower; whereby, by knowing no other original, and deeper ignorance of themselves, they might have enjoyed the happiness of inferior creatures, who in tranquillity possess their constitutions, as having not the apprehension to deplore their own natures, and, being framed below the circumference of these hopes, or cognition of better being, the wisdom of God hath necessitated their contentment: but the superior ingredient and obscured part of ourselves, whereto all present felicities afford no resting contentment, will be able at last to tell us, we are more than our present selves, and evacuate such hopes in the fruition of their own accomplishments.

It is warm, I am alive, I am calm and sad, I hardly know why. In this existence so even, so tranquil, and so gentle as I have here, I am in an element that weakens me morally while strengthening me physically; and I fall into melancholies of honey and roses which are none the less melancholy. It seems to me that all those I love forget me, and that it is justice, because I live a selfish life having nothing to do for any one of them.

It sometimes seemed so peculiar and wrong to her that you could be that intimate with someone, to go to sleep with them and wake up with them, to do really quite extraordinarily personal things together on a regular basis, and then, suddenly, you don’t even know their telephone number, or where they’re living, or working, or what they did today or last week or last year... That’s why break‐ups felt like your skin was being torn from your body. It was actually strange that more people weren’t like Saskia, instead of being so well‐behaved and dignified about it.

I was willing to yield to nostalgia, that melancholy residue of desire.

It was that time of dusk when there is a—deepening of the interior shadows. It is a melancholy time: all you need do is switch on one lamp and the inside and the outside will separate, held apart by the reflections in the glass, and evening will begin.

I want to drown in my tears, And my tears are my prayers.

listen thoughtfully sounds of laughter gaiety and melancholy galore

I wish to cry. Yet, I laugh, and my lipstick leaves a red stain like a bloody crescent moon on the top of the beer can.

Listen O’ westward winds,chime a requiem for my languid thoughts,for they are fruitless by the lone hours,and count not my tears, O’ streams in my stupor;and these low melancholy strings, the soul shall tune!

Maybe I'm still the same as I was then. I'm just looking out at the world through a crack in a closet door...

Looking back on months and years of intimacy, to feel that your friend, while you still remember the moving words you exchanged, is yet growing distant and living in a world apart—all this is sadder far than partings brought by death.

Mais, vrai, j’ai trop pleuré ! Les Aubes sont navrantes. Toute lune est atroce et tout soliel amer: L’âcre amour m’a gonflé de torpeurs enivrantes. Ô que ma quille éclate ! Ô que j’aille à la mer!

Many persons will say to such people,"Why do you so pore and muse and gratify the devil?"―whereas it is the very nature of the disease to cause such fixed musings. They might as well say, "Why are you diseased? Why won't you get well?" Their so musing proceeds from a violent pressure on their spirits, which they are not able to remove. Some think that melancholy persons are pleased with their distemper, but I believe that they are as pleased as a man who is lying on thorns or briars, or as one who is thrown into a fiery furnace. It is vastly painful to them to be in this condition, and they cannot be supposed to hate themselves so much as to be fond of pain.

Maybe all Americans who suffer from melancholy act as if they have gone mad. But I truly thought he might throw himself in the river, and I don't want his ghost visiting to keep telling me he's sorry.

Maybe you've understood by now that for men like myself, that is, melancholy men for whom love, agony, happiness and misery are just excuses for maintaining eternal loneliness, life offers neither great joy nor great sadness. I'm not saying we can't relate to other souls overwhelmed by these feelings, on the contrary, we sympathize with them. What we cannot fathom is the odd disquiet our souls sink into at such times. This silent turmoil dims our intellects and dampens our hearts, usurping the place reserved for the true joy and sadness we ought to experience.

Melancholia is the disease of the middle-class. The Workers don't know what it means.

Melancholia is, I believe, a musical problem: a dissonance, a change in rhythm. While on the outside everything happens with the vertiginous rhythm of a cataract, on the inside is the exhausted adagio of drops of water falling from time to tired time. For this reason the outside, seen from the melancholic inside, appears absurd and unreal, and constitutes ‘the farce we all must play’. But for an instant – because of a wild music, or a drug, or the sexual act carried to its climax – the very slow rhythm of the melancholic soul does not only rise to that of the outside world: it overtakes it with an ineffably blissful exorbitance, and the soul then thrills animated by delirious new energies

Melancholy is an escape not from reality, but unreality of the world.

Melancholy is incompatible with bicycling.

Memories come back, pressing in on you, like ghost faces in the darkness pushing up the glass, trying to get into the lit room.

Men do not die on mornings like this: whatever happens then happens in their name, like the lives of obscure saints, who exist only in folk memory.

Men who read a lot have a more sensitive disposition, added Fowler. [...] I did not know what to say to this. Maybe reading is a sort of curse is all I mean, concluded Fowler. Maybe it's better for a man to stay inside his own mind. Amen, I felt like saying, although I do not know why.

Me parecía que mi vida estaba condenada a transcurrir en ese lugar solitario y apartado del mundo, en medio de una melancolía impotente de la que no tenía yo ni fuerzas ni ganas de salir.

Min mors sorg var primitiv og altomfattende: Den sugede ilten ud af luften. En tung, bedøvet fornemmelse fyldte mit hoved og min krop hver gang jeg kom hjem. Ingen af os – hverken min bror eller jeg selv, og da slet ikke min mor – fandt trøst i hinandens selskab. Vi var bare i eksil sammen, fanget i en fælles lidelse. For første gang var jeg bevidst om, at jeg blev grebet af åndelig ensomhed, og jeg kiggede ud på gaden, vendte mig mod de drømmende og melankolske indre anelser, der var blevet den eneste lindring fra det jeg hurtigt opfattede som en tilstand af tab og nederlag.

My ghost is the only soul who ever comes to cry on my grave... Only the skies cried sincerely on my funeral.

Mistrust of good success hath done this deed. O hateful error, Melancholy's child, Why dost thou show to the apt thoughts of men The things that are not? O Error, soon concieved, Thou never com'st unto a happy birth, But kill'st the mother that engendered thee.

More often than not, I get lost in magical melancholic emotions and thoughts just to get a vacation from the boring realities of life.

My dear melancholy, Enraged she's colic! Lovely indeed a fellow And so sweet a collie. Never but so mellow Can she be like a dolly? However she's so frolic! Or could she get yellow Like a peach, but jolly? You'll regret her follies!

My sadness is beautiful. It infuses everything I do. It is at the core of my identity and always has been, just as happiness is in some people. I refuse to be told that it's a flaw. I will not mute it with medications for the sake of society. I will hold it close to me and celebrate it rightfully while the rest of the world fails to see it for what it is and it will be their loss.

My prayers, my tears, my wishes, fears, and lamentations, were witnessed by myself and heaven alone. When we are harassed by sorrows or anxieties, or long oppressed by any powerful feelings which we must keep to ourselves, for which we can obtain and seek no sympathy from any living creature, and which yet we cannot, or will not wholly crush, we often naturally seek relief in poetry—and often find it, too—whether in the effusions of others, which seem to harmonize with our existing case, or in our own attempts to give utterance to those thoughts and feelings in strains less musical, perchance, but more appropriate, and therefore more penetrating and sympathetic, and, for the time, more soothing, or more powerful to rouse and to unburden the oppressed and swollen heart.

Neither can you explain yourself to me. Nor can I explain myself to you. You have your sadness and I have mine.

My world is a million shattered pieces put together, glued by my tears, where each piece is nothing but a reflection of YOU.

Não conseguia pensar em nada que desejasse especialmente na vida, excepto aquelas faíscas de cor púrpura - aquelas flores de fogo desabrochando selvaticamente -; daria a vida para poder segurá-las-

Night never needs a shade but it requires to fade into the grin of twinkling stars where light is just a glint of scars

night has enveloped, to give me some relief now invisible are walls of separation, and thy grief where blood quenches the thirst disloyalty is faith last and first is the religion my beloved belongs to I beckoned, red and black robed lady with a wand let me take her by the hand heard of her about sorcery her powers useless, and witch now about to succumb from just a gaze of eyes filled with Kohl of Leila my nights worthless, body breathless every moment, feeling restless be silent and hear, hear me, my cries don't forget the promise you swore I have lost my childhood over you don't know, how these years left me alone sufferings, separation, theft me alone I never knew how pain excrutiates sometimes, i enlivened you my dear Love is a blessing, and not a fear in a melancholy cloudy day, I mourn glistening eyes, weeping sky, and heart torn I gaze from a window in Kashmir For a moment, condoling the tragedy, sighing In sombre time, lifeless, as if dying