Melancholy Quotes - Page 13

• How frequently has melancholy and even misanthropy taken possession of me, when the world has disgusted me, and friends have proven unkind. I have then considered myself as a particle broken off from the grand mass of mankind.

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  Taken, Broken, World

  Mary Wollstonecraft (2007). “Letters from Scandinavia”, p.13, Lulu.com

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• I strongly wish for what I faintly hope; like the daydreams of melancholy men, I think and think in things impossible, yet love to wander in that golden maze.

  John Dryden

  Men, Thinking, Wish

  'The Rival Ladies' (1664) act 3, sc. 1

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• Only the foolish, blinded by language's conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it's melancholy rim, green in it's envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it's greatest rages, black.

  Salman Rushdie

  Heart, Thinking, Fire

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• Its tall chimneys throw up black smoke, impregnating everything with soot, and the miners' faces as they traveled the streets were also imbued with that ancient melancholy of smoke, unifying everything with its grayish monotones, a perfect coupling with the gray mountain days.

  Che Guevara

  Perfect, Black, Mountain

  Che Guevara (2013). “The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey”, Ocean Press

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• I had the feeling of slipping down a smooth bottomless pit. It had nothing to do with Breuer and the people. It had nothing to do with Pat even. It was the melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them; that love begins with a human being but does not end in him; and that everything can be there: a human being, love, happiness, life — and that yet in some terrible way it is always too little, and grows ever less the more it seems.

  Erich Maria Remarque

  Reality, People, Feelings

  Erich Maria Remarque (1937). “Three Comrades”

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• Feelings, she learned, were hard to fight. She treasured his smiles and compliments and tried not to dwell on the fact that he gave this things to his friend Kel. His dreamy-eyed gazes, poems, and fits of passionate melancholy were for Uline. It was hard not to resent the older girl.

  Tamora Pierce

  Girl, Fighting, Feelings

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• Congratulations," he said, his voice dry. "You finally managed to find a woman as tragically noble as yourself. I didn't think one existed." "I'm not tragic." Kaldar held up his hand. "Spare me. Some children are born wearing a silk shirt; you were born wrapped in melancholy. When they slapped you to make you cry, you just sighed heavily and a single tear rolled from your eye." He dragged his finger from the corner of his left eye to his cheek. " Your first words were probably 'woe is me.'" "My first words were 'Kaldar, shut up!' because you talked too much. Still do.

  Ilona Andrews

  Children, Congratulations, Eye

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• He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of it's frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.

  Edith Wharton

  Loneliness, Winter, Profound

  Ethan Frome preface (1911)

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• I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Art, Misery, Treatment

  Vladimir Nabokov (2010). “Lolita”, p.283, Vintage

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• Once or twice a day, I am enveloped inside what I like to call the Impenetrable Shield of Melancholy. This shield, it is impenetrable. Hence the name. I cannot speak. And while I can feel myself freeze up, I can't do anything about it.

  Sarah Vowell

  Names, Shields, Speak

  Sarah Vowell (2003). “The Partly Cloudy Patriot”, p.13, Simon and Schuster

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• I'd like to die listening to a piece of music. I imagine this as so easy, so natural, but naturally it's quite impossible. Notes stab too softly. The wounds they leave behind may smart, but they don't fester. Melancholy and pain trickle out instead of blood. When the notes cease, all is peaceful within me again.

  Robert Walser

  Pain, Smart, Blood

  Robert Walser (1990). “Masquerade and other stories”, Johns Hopkins Univ Pr

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• Night's candles have burned out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountaintops." Hope tinged with melancholy - like life.

  William Shakespeare

  Night, Tiptoes, Misty

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• Melancholy held me hostage, and the bees built a hive of sadness in my soul.

  Laurie Halse Anderson

  Sadness, Soul, Bees

  Laurie Halse Anderson (2010). “Chains”, p.319, Simon and Schuster

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• More than anything, the journal wanted. It wanted more than it could hold, more than words could describe, more than diagrams could illustrate. Longing burst from the pages, in every frantic line and every hectic sketch and every dark-printed definition. There was something pained and melancholy about it.

  Maggie Stiefvater

  Dark, Lines, Definitions

  Maggie Stiefvater (2012). “The Raven Boys”, p.70, Scholastic Inc.

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• The palace started as a single vaulted room and grew in proportion to my despair. It began as an exercise to keep my mind from its melancholy, then it became a dream and a necessity. . . . I built a temple in my head. . . . Its hallways were as lofty as a cathedral, and the arch of each window as supple as a bow. Its corridors were the passages of my own brain.

  Lisa St. Aubin de Terán

  Dream, Exercise, Mind

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• When the oldest Chatwin, melancholy Martin, opens the cabinet of the grandfather clock that stands in a dark, narrow back hallway in his aunt’s house and slip through into Fillory...it’s like he’s opening the covers of a book, but a book that did what books always promised to do and never ac tually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into something better.

  Lev Grossman

  Book, Dark, Aunt

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• One does not really feel much grief at other people's sorrows; one tries, and puts on a melancholy face, thinking oneself brutal for not caring more; but one cannot and it is better, for if one grieved too deeply at other people's tears, life would be unendurable; and every man has sufficient sorrows of his own without taking to heart his neighbour's.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Grief, Heart, Caring

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• Time plays like an accordion in the way it can stretch out and compress itself in a thousand melodic ways. Months on end may pass blindingly in a quick series of chords, open-shut, together-apart; and then a single melancholy week may seem like a year's pining, one long unfolding note.

  Julia Glass

  Years, Play, Long

  Julia Glass (2003). “Three Junes”, Vintage

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• These books have not made George nobler or better or more truly wise. It is just that he likes listening to their voices, the one or the other, acording to his mood. He misuses them quite ruthlessly - despite the respectful way he has to talk about them in public - to put him to bed, to take his mind off the hands of the clock, to relax the nagging of his pyloric spasm, to gossip him out of his melancholy, to trigger the conditioned reflexes of his colon.

  Christopher Isherwood

  Wise, Book, Hands

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• And then I became aware of all the magnificent silk wrapped around my body, and had the feeling I might drown in beauty. At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.

  Arthur Golden

  Feelings, Body, Might

  Arthur Golden (2008). “Memoirs Of A Geisha”, p.187, Random House

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• She also considered very seriously what she would look like in a little cottage in the middle of the forest, dressed in a melancholy gray and holding communion only with the birds and trees; a life of retirement away from the vain world; a life into which no man came. It had its attractions, but she decided that gray did not suit her.

  A. A. Milne

  Retirement, Bird, Tree

  A. A. Milne (2012). “Once on a Time”, p.206, The Floating Press

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• So that it must be only by the imagination that Satan has access to the soul, to tempt and delude it, or suggest anything to it. And this seems to be the reason why persons that are under the disease of melancholy are commonly so visibly and remarkably subject to the suggestions and temptations of Satan... Innumerable are the ways by which the mind may be led on to all kind of evil thoughts, by the exciting of external ideas in the imagination.

  Jonathan Edwards

  Ideas, Evil, Imagination

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• Standing here, in this quiet house where I can hear the birds chirping out back, I think I’m kind of getting the concept of closure. It’s no big dramatic before-after. It’s more like that melancholy feeling you get at the end of a really good vacation. Something special is ending, and you’re sad, but you can’t be that sad because, hey, it was good while it lasted, and there’ll be other vacations, other good times.

  Gayle Forman

  Thinking, Vacation, Birds Chirping

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• The value of ourselves is but the value of our melancholy and our disquiet.

  Maurice Maeterlinck

  Sadness, Misery, Values

  Maurice Maeterlinck (2015). “The Treasure of the Humble: Works of Maeterlinck”, p.36, 谷月社

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• Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.

  Ray Bradbury

  Philosophy, Lying, Moving

  Ray Bradbury (2016). “Fahrenheit 451”, p.30, Hamilton Books

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