#melancholy

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. ↗

— Dan Simmons

#inner-world #melancholy #men #reading #men

If work and leisure are soon to be subordinated to this one utopian principle - absolute busyness - then utopia and melancholy will come to coincide: an age without conflict will dawn, perpetually busy - and without consciousness. ↗

— Gunther Grass

#age #busy #busyness #coincide #come

Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind. The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#art #happiness #life #melancholy #sadness

I have a taste for a kind of melancholy and for being an absolute victim of love. ↗

— Arielle Dombasle

#being #i #kind #love #melancholy

There's little of the melancholy element in her, my lord: she is never sad but when she sleeps; and not ever sad then; for I have heard my daughter say, she hath often dreamt of unhappiness, and waked herself with laughing. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#happiness #melancholy #sadness #sleep #waking

It is better, however, for his own reputation that the story-teller should risk a few actions for libel on account of these unfortunate coincidences than that he should adopt the melancholy device of using blanks or asterisks. ↗

— James Payn

#actions #adopt #asterisks #better #blanks

There was a darkness, a melancholy, that people had trouble accepting. Maybe now, it would work better. ↗

— Alain Resnais

#better #darkness #had #maybe #melancholy

I go to sleep alone, and wake up alone. I take walks. I work until I'm tired. I watch the wind play with the trash that's been under the snow all winter. Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love intensified by abscence? ↗

— Audrey Niffenegger

#melancholy #love

Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won. ↗

— Arthur Wellesley

#except #half #lost #melancholy #nothing

At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy. ↗

— Arthur Golden

#beauty #melancholy #memoirs-of-a-geisha #beauty