#melancholy

I only wanted absolute quiet to think out why I had developed a sad attitude toward sadness, a melancholy attitude toward melancholy and a tragic attitude toward tragedy — why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#sadness #tragedy #attitude

La mélancolie est l’illustre compagnon de la beauté; elle l’est si bien que je ne peux concevoir aucune beauté qui ne porte en elle sa tristesse. ↗

— Charles Baudelaire

#melancholy #spleen #beauty

To be sane, he held, was either to be sedated by melancholy or activated by hysteria, two responses which were 'always and equally warranted for those of sound insight'. All others were irrational, merely symptoms of imaginations left idle, of memories out of work. And above these mundane responses, the only elevation allowable, the only valid transcendence, was a sardonic one: a bliss that annihilated the universe with jeers of dark joy, a mindful ecstasy. Anything else in the way of 'mysticism' was a sign of deviation or distraction, and a heresy to the obvious. (“The Medusa”) ↗

— Thomas Ligotti

#insanity #melancholy #mysticism #sanity #sardonic

Melancholy is no bad thing. ↗

— Sting

#bad thing #melancholy #thing

I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself was weeping, and I felt my face and it was dry. Then I looked at the window and thought: Why, yes, it's just the rain, the rain, always the rain, and turned over, sadder still, and fumbled about for my dripping sleep and tried to slip it back on. ↗

— Ray Bradbury

#rain #sadness #sleep #novel

Cut my life into pizzas. this is my plastic fork. oven baking, no breathing, dont give a fuck if its carbs that i'm eating' -Catherine Spann ↗

— Catherine Spann

#food #love #melancholy #poetry #sad

The sound of the mandolin is a very curious sound because it's cheerful and melancholy at the same time, and I think it comes from that shadow string, the double strings. ↗

— Rita Dove

#cheerful #comes #curious #double #i

I suppose there's a melancholy tone at the back of the American mind, a sense of something lost. And it's the lost world of Thomas Jefferson. It is the lost sense of innocence that we could live with a very minimal state, with a vast sense of space in which to work out freedom. ↗

— George Will

#back #could #freedom #i #innocence

Melancholy has ceased to be an individual phenomenon, an exception. It has become the class privilege of the wage earner, a mass state of mind that finds its cause wherever life is governed by production quotas. ↗

— Gunther Grass

#cause #ceased #class #earner #exception

We may smile at these matters, but they are melancholy illustrations. ↗

— Joseph Howe

#matters #may #melancholy #smile #these