#melancholy

To muse for long unwearied hours with my attention riveted to some frivolous device upon the margin, or in the typography of a book — to become absorbed for the better part of a summer's day in a quaint shadow falling aslant upon the tapestry, or upon the floor — to lose myself for an entire night in watching the steady flame of a lamp, or the embers of a fire — to dream away whole days over the perfume of a flower — to repeat monotonously some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind — to lose all sense of motion or physical existence in a state of absolute bodily quiescence long and obstinately persevered in — Such were a few of the most common and least pernicious vagaries induced by a condition of the mental faculties, not, indeed, altogether unparalleled, but certainly bidding defiance to any thing like analysis or explanation. ↗

— Edgar Allan Poe

#monomania #obsession #dreams

Pain seems to be easier, or melancholy seems to be easier to portray in a character. I don't know if that's because I'm a human being or because I'm an Irishman or both. ↗

— Colin Farrell

#being #both #character #easier #human

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

I'm not writing just about melancholy stuff anymore, I made a point to cover a wide range of emotions. ↗

— Chantal Kreviazuk

#anymore #cover #emotions #i #just

This melancholy London - I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air. ↗

— William Butler Yeats

#compelled #feels #i #imagine #like

I think it takes an amazing amount of energy to convince oneself that the Forever Person isn't just around the corner. In the end I believe we never do convince ourselves. I know that I found it increasingly hard to maintain the pose of emotional self-sufficiency lying on my bed and sitting at my desk, watching the gulls cartwheeling in the clouds over the bridges, cradling myself in my own arms, breathing warm chocolate-and-vodka breath on a rose I had found on a street corner, trying to force it to bloom. ↗

— Douglas Coupland

#loneliness #love #melancholy #life

Know ye not that there is here in this world a secret confraternity, which one might call the Company of Melancholiacs? That people there are who by natural constitution have been given a different nature and disposition than the others; that have a larger heart and a swifter blood, that wish and demand more, have stronger desires and a yearning which is wilder and more ardent than that of the common herd. They are fleet as children over whose birth good fairies have presided; their eyes are opened wider; their senses are more subtile in all their perceptions. The gladness and joy of life, they drink with the roots of their heart, the while the others merely grasp them with coarse hands. ↗

— Jens Peter Jacobsen

#melancholy #life

Melancholy and sadness are the start of doubt... doubt is the beginning of despair; despair is the cruel beginning of the differing degrees of wickedness. ↗

— Isidore Ducasse Lautreamont

#cruel #degrees #despair #differing #doubt

Never give way to melancholy; resist it steadily, for the habit will encroach. ↗

— Sydney Smith

#habit #melancholy #never #resist #steadily

Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#charms #depression #fits #melancholy #minus