#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

Because memories fall apart, too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow. In the beginning she haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying again. ↗

— John Green

#reality #sadness #dreams

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

I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom. ↗

— Edgar Allan Poe

#alchohol #drinking #drugs #loneliness #melancholy

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

A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds. ↗

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

#poets

Name me no names for my disease, With uninforming breath; I tell you I am none of these, But homesick unto death —Homesick for hills that I had known, For brooks that I had crossed, ...Before I met this flesh and bone And followed and was lost… .And though they break my heart at last, Yet name no name of ills. Say only, "Here is where he passed, Seeking again those hills. ↗

— Witter Bynner

#melancholy #regret #yearning #death

I think every human being has a level of melancholy in life and in general. ↗

— Sandra Bullock

#every #general #human #human being #i

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