Melancholy Quotes - Page 22

• The melancholy river bears us on. When the moon comes through the trailing willow boughs, I see your face, I hear your voice and the bird singing as we pass the osier bed. What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Woven together, like reeds in moonlight.

  Virginia Woolf

  Moon, Voice, Rivers

  Virginia Woolf (2015). “The String Quartet”, p.5, Booklassic

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• I'm afraid they're in love," he said, concerned. "They don't want to leave you." He lifted one hand from her waist to gently brush a pair from her neck, where their wings fanned against her jaw. Melancholy, he said, "I know just how they feel.

  Laini Taylor

  Hands, Wings, Want

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• My curiosity, alas, is not the kind that can be satisfied by objective knowledge. Plato said that opinion is worthless and that only knowledge counts, which is a neat formulation. ... But melancholy Danes from the northern mists understand that opinion is all there is. The great questions transcend fact, and discourse is a process of personality. Knowledge cannot respond to knowledge. And wisdom? Is it not opinion refined, opinion killed and resuscitated upward? Maybe Plato would have agreed with this.

  Hayden Carruth

  Plato, Men, Personality

  "Reluctantly: Autobiographical Essays".

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• Boredom is that awful state of inaction when the very medicine ― that is, activity ― which could solve it, is seen as odious. Archery? It is too cold, and besides, the butts need re-covering; the rats have been at the straw. Music? To hear it is tedious; to compose it, too taxing. And so on. Of all the afflictions, boredom is ultimately the most unmanning. Eventually, it transforms you into a great nothing who does nothing ― a cousin to sloth and a brother to melancholy.

  Margaret George

  Cousin, Brother, Archery

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• It's from being melancholy and having my human down experiences that I learn, that I overcome, that I transform - and these realizations I put into song. That's what I choose to put in my backpack and carry with me around the world.

  Jason Mraz

  Song, Overcoming, Realization

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• I wasn't born in New York and I may never live there again, and just thinking about it makes me melancholy, but I was changed forever by it, my imagination is manacled to it, and I wear its mark the way you wear a scar. Whatever happens, whether I like it or not, New York City is fated always to remain my home.

  Luc Sante

  New York, Home, Thinking

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• A melancholy-looking man, he had the appearance of one who has searched for the leak in life's gas-pipe with a lighted candle.

  P. G. Wodehouse

  Depression, Men, Appearance

  P. G. Wodehouse (2012). “The Man Upstairs: And Other Stories”, p.126, The Floating Press

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• It was the tenderness mingled with melancholy which we bring to a time that belongs irrevocably to the past, when a pale, delicate shadow rises from it bearing the lilies of the dead, and in it we find a forgotten likeness to ourselves. And that faint, wistful shadow, that pale scent, seemed to vanish away into a wide, full, warm stream - the life that now lay open before him.

  Robert Musil

  Past, Delicate Life, Shadow

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• Life is a well of joy; but for those out of whom an upset stomach speaks, which is the father of melancholy, all wells are poisoned.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Father, Upset Stomach, Joy

  Friedrich Nietzsche (1977). “The Portable Nietzsche”, p.195, Penguin

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• The brevity of human life gives a melancholy to the profession of the architect.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Giving, Architecture, Human Life

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1973). “Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks: 1847-1848”, p.382, Harvard University Press

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• Symmetry is ennui, and ennui is the very essence of grief and melancholy. Despair yawns.

  Victor Hugo

  Grief, Order, Essence

  Victor Hugo, Charles Edwin Wilbour (1862). “Cosette”, p.84

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• If there is anybody I detest, it is weak-minded sentimentalists-all those melancholy people who, out of an excess of sympathy for others, miss the thrill of their own essence and drift through life without identity, like a human fog, feeling sorry for everyone.

  John Cheever

  Sorry, Fog, Essence

  John Cheever, Blake Bailey (2009). “John Cheever: Collected Stories and Other Writings”

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• Without your wounds where would your power be? It is your melancholy that makes your low voice tremble into the hearts of men and women. The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. In Love’s service, only wounded soldiers can serve. Physician, draw back.

  Thornton Wilder

  Children, Heart, Angel

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• I went to bed feeling melancholy, wishing I could have poured out all my fears and insecurities to my mom. Wasn’t that what normal mothers and daughters did?

  Richelle Mead

  Mom, Daughter, Mother

  Richelle Mead (2011). “Bloodlines”, p.32, Penguin

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• With impeccable prose, dry wit, and uncommon wisdom, Ted Thompson brings to life one family's painful disappointments and powerful resilience. The Land of Steady Habits combines Austen's shrewd mastery of domestic economics with Updike's compassion for the melancholy commuter to make something elegant, fresh, and brilliant.

  Maggie Shipstead

  Powerful, Disappointment, Compassion

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• Christmas can have a real melancholy aspect, 'cause it packages itself as this idea of perfect family cohesion and love, and you're always going to come up short when you measure your personal life against the idealized personal lives that are constantly thrust in our faces, primarily by TV commercials.

  Dan Savage

  Christmas, Real, Ideas

  Interview with Tasha Robinson, www.avclub.com. February 08, 2006.

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• Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Pain, Expression, Sorrow

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (2006). “A Defence of Poetry: an Essay: Easyread Large Edition”, p.57, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• I've always seen making movies as a bunch of little births and deaths. We come in. We don't know anybody or very few people that we work with, but the nature of the job pulls us into a sort of an intimate kind of relationship and communication and then they're gone and it's kind of melancholy. You miss that guy but then suddenly you're working with him again maybe somewhere.

  Beau Bridges

  Jobs, Communication, People

  Source: www.moviesonline.ca

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• The whole house seemed to exhale a melancholy breath of emptiness

  Michael Chabon

  House, Emptiness, Whole

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• Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.

  Robert E. Howard

  Hands, Feet, Black

  Robert E. Howard (2007). “The Best of Robert E. Howard Volume 1: Volume 1: The Shadow Kingdom”, p.473, Del Rey

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• For me, the melancholy of the late XXth Century is walking late at night by the Mont Blanc pen store and seeing these things always strike me as simulacra of luxury items. They seem like fakes.

  William Gibson

  Night, Luxury, Fake

  Source: craphound.com

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• Abraham Lincoln was a melancholy man, so he had a dark side that appeals to horror fans.

  Bill Oberst Jr.

  Dark, Men, Fans

  Source: horrornews.net

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• The sound of distant breakers made her heart ache with melancholy. She was in the mood when the sea has a saddening effect upon the nerves. It is only when we are very happy that we can bear to gaze merrily upon the vast and limitless expanse of water, rolling on and on with such persistent, irritating monotony to the accompaniment of our thoughts, whether grave or gay. When they are gay, the waves echo their gaiety; but when they are sad, then every breaker, as it rolls, seems to bring additional sadness and to speak to us of hopelessness and of the pettiness of all our joys.

  Baroness Orczy

  Heart, Sadness, Gay

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• For a long time I had not approached the forbidden fruit called happiness, but it was now tempting me with a melancholy persistence. I felt as though Sonoko were an abyss above which I stood poised.

  Yukio Mishima

  Persistence, Long, Fruit

  Yukio Mishima (1958). “Confessions of a Mask”, p.194, New Directions Publishing

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• I think perhaps it is a generational thing. I talk to younger people and they say, Where is this melancholy city you talk about My Istanbul is a sunny place.

  Orhan Pamuk

  Thinking, Istanbul, Cities

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