#melancholy

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

#humor #melancholy #wit #humor

Lie still, lie still, my breaking heart; My silent heart, lie still and break: Life, and the world, and mine own self, are changed For a dream's sake. ↗

— Christina Rossetti

#sadness #change

The lost glove is happy. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#loss #melancholy #melancholy

This was a characteroloical prelude, but it wasn’t chemical or somatic. It was the anatomy of melancholy, not the anatomy of his brain. ↗

— Jeffrey Eugenides

#chemical #marriage-plot #melancholy #mental-health #mental-illness

That's most interesting. But I was no more a mind-reader then than today. I was weeping for an altogether different reason. When I watched you dancing that day, I saw something else. I saw a new world coming rapidly. More scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But a harsh, cruel world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go. That is what I saw. It wasn't really you, what you were doing, I know that. But I saw you and it broke my heart. And I've never forgotten. ↗

— Kazuo Ishiguro

#coldness #cruelty #dancing #future #heartbreak

I have often thought what a melancholy world this would be without children, and what an inhuman world without the aged. ↗

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#children #human world #i #inhuman #melancholy

A lot of people say I wouldn't have a down day, but you look at the music and there's real melancholy. ↗

— Stephan Jenkins

#down #i #look #lot #melancholy

Do not make best friends with a melancholy sad soul. They always are heavily loaded, and you must bear half. ↗

— Francois Fenelon

#bear #best #friends #half #heavily

For some nights I slept profoundly; but still every morning I felt the same lassitude, and a languor weighed upon me all day. I felt myself a changed girl. A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was slowly sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome possession of me. If it was sad, the tone of mind which this induced was also sweet. Whatever it might be, my soul acquiesced in it. ↗

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

#melancholy #change

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 ↗

— Alejandra Pizarnik

#melancholy #change