Melancholy Quotes - Page 11

• In terms of songwriting I think it might be a circular thing. I tend to go back and forth between quieter melancholy songs and more forceful, less traditional structures. I think when I find myself leaning too far in one direction I kind of rebel against it and pull the other way.

  Thalia Zedek

  Song, Thinking, Rebel

  Source: chicago.gopride.com

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• In 21 years there are a lot of ups and downs. There are melancholy times. There are sad times. There are happy times. There are unsure times. There are life lessons.

  Kenny Chesney

  Life Lesson, Years, Happy Times

  Source: www.chicagotribune.com

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• That kind of unease, that melancholy, is of course partly my interpretation, but partly, I think, it's something that's really there [in America] as well. It resonates with this moment and the sort of alienation from the power structure a lot of people feel, as well as a certain amount of desperation, in the hope of disrupting the power structure so they can live better lives. I think in those ways, it's intimately connected to today.

  Peter van Agtmael

  Thinking, America, People

  "Donald Trump May Be on Your Television, But Here’s What America Really Looks Like". Interview with Mark Murrmann, www.motherjones.com. February 25, 2017.

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• [My muse] likes to inhabit tea leaves, sunlight filtered through bamboo, melancholy clouds over the Devon coastline, a weedy railroad crossing in the Southern States, bubblegum pop from the sixties, torch songs from the forties, undersea caves where B-movie octopi grapple with men in loincloths, sacred groves of pink anime dryads, Victorian fairy paintings executed by gentlemen in lunatic asylums and so on.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Song, Anime, Men

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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• [Prozac] didn't seem to have any effect whatsoever on my melancholy, my dark vision, and everything else that I'd taken it for.

  Leonard Cohen

  Taken, Dark, Vision

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• There isn't much to say about my childhood. I remember explosions of intense happiness, followed shortly afterwards by profound melancholy that always prompted remarks and comments from those around me on how remote my life was from my age. Therefore I rapidly lost all my respect for age. From then on, I always lived without any age, given that every year I used to repudiate it, choosing another one for the sole good reason that I liked it better.

  Domenico Gnoli

  Years, Profound, Childhood

  Source: observer.com

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• I wanted to work with Barry [ Jenkins]. I am a big fan of his from Medicine for Melancholy years ago. Tarrell [Alvin McCraney] is my favorite playwright. I will do anything he asks. The characters were so clearly drawn and three dimensional. It was an easy thing to say yes to.

  Andre Holland

  Character, Years, Medicine

  Source: chicago.gopride.com

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• They say that no one's gonna play this on the radio. They said the melancholy blues were dead and gone. But only songs like these played in minor keys, keep those memories holding on.

  Billy Joel

  Song, Memories, Keys

  Song: Baby Grand, Album: The Bridge, 1986

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• What Simone Weil said politics has meant all along, which means that you fight for 11 percent, 12 percent, 13 percent, that you avoid golden-age thinking and romantic melancholy and you just keep pushing.

  Robert Hass

  Mean, Fighting, Thinking

  Interview with Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April, 1997.

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• Good-humor, gay spirits, are the liberators, the sure cure for spleen and melancholy. Deeper than tears, these irradiate the tophets with their glad heavens. Go laugh, vent the pits, transmuting imps into angels by the alchemy of smiles. The satans flee at the sight of these redeemers.

  Amos Bronson Alcott

  Angel, Gay, Sight

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• I kept.. ..returning to the (ancient Roman) wall paintings with their veiled melancholy and elegant plasticity.

  William Baziotes

  Wall, Painting, Ancient

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• One could say the higher the spirit goes, the more deeply the soul sinks down into the waters of melancholy and tragedy. Drowning in that water is as sweet as rising.

  Robert Bly

  Sweet, Water, Soul

  Source: www.utne.com

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• Mirth itself is too often but melancholy in disguise.

  Leigh Hunt

  Mirth, Disguise

  Leigh Hunt (1859). “Leigh Hunt's Works: Selections from the English poets”

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• To be bowed by grief is folly; Naught is gained by melancholy; Better than the pain of thinking, Is to steep the sense in drinking.

  Alcaeus

  Pain, Drinking, Grief

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• Affection, like melancholy, magnifies trifles.

  Leigh Hunt

  Affection, Trifles, Magnifying

  Leigh Hunt, Thornton Leigh Hunt (1862). “The Correspondence of Leigh Hunt”, p.31, London : Smith, Elder

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• When soured by disappointment we must endeavor to pursue some fixed and pleasing course of study, that there may be no blank leaf in our book of life. Painful and disagreeable ideas vanish from the mind that can fix its attention upon any subject.

  Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann

  Disappointment, Book, Ideas

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• Melancholy is the nurse of frenzy.

  William Shakespeare

  Nurse, Frenzy

  William Shakespeare (1851). “Dictionary of Shakespearian quotations: Exhibiting the most forcible passages illustrative of the various passions, affections and emotions of the human mind”, p.230

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• Imaginary evils soon become real ones by indulging our reflections on them; as he who in a melancholy fancy sees something like a face on the wall or the wainscot can, by two or three touches with a lead pencil, make it look visible, and agreeing with what he fancied.

  Jonathan Swift

  Wall, Real, Reflection

  Jonathan Swift, Thomas Sheridan, John Nichols (1808). “The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, D.D. ...: With Notes, Historical and Critical”, p.304

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• How truly does this journal contain my real and undisguised thoughts--I always write it according to the humour I am in, and if astranger was to think it worth reading, how capricious--insolent & whimsical I must appear!--one moment flighty and half mad,--the next sad and melancholy. No matter! Its truth and simplicity are its sole recommendations.

  Fanny Burney

  Real, Reading, Writing

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• Christianity is the religion of melancholy and hypochondria. Islam, on the other hand, promotes apathy, and Judaism instills its adherents with a certain choleric vehemence, the heathen Greeks may well be called happy optimists.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Hands, Greek, Islam

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• Every disastrous accident alarms us, and sets us on enquiries concerning the principles whence it arose: Apprehensions spring up with regard to futurity: And the mind, sunk into diffidence, terror, and melancholy, has recourse to every method of appeasing those secret intelligent powers, on whom our fortune is supposed entirely to depend.

  David Hume

  Spring, Intelligent, Secret

  David Hume (1788). “An inquiry concerning human understanding. A dissertation on the passions. An inquiry concerning the principles of morals. The natural history of religion”, p.374

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• Weakness, fear, melancholy, together with ignorance, are the true sources of superstition. Hope, pride, presumption, a warm indignation, together with ignorance, are the true sources of enthusiasm.

  David Hume

  Ignorance, Pride, Together

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• My curiosity to see the melancholy spectacle of the executions was so strong that I could not resist it, although I was sensible that I would suffer much from it.... I got upon a scaffold near the fatal tree so that I could clearly see all the dismal scene.... I was most terribly shocked, and thrown into a very deep melancholy.

  James Boswell

  Death, Strong, Tree

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• Tis going, I own, like the Knight of the Woeful Countenance, in quest of melancholy adventures--but I know not how it is, but I am never so perfectly conscious of the existence of a soul within me, as when I am entangled in them.

  Laurence Sterne

  Adventure, Knights, Soul

  Laurence Sterne, Melvyn New, Geoffrey Day (2006). “A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy: And, Continuation of the Bramine's Journal : with Related Texts”, p.156, Hackett Publishing

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• Work saves us from melancholy. Pleasure exposes us to it.

  Mason Cooley

  Work, Pleasure

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