#melancholy

Depression is melancholy minus its charms. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#melancholy #metaphor

So that it must be only by the imagination that Satan has access to the soul, to tempt and delude it, or suggest anything to it. And this seems to be the reason why persons that are under the disease of melancholy are commonly so visibly and remarkably subject to the suggestions and temptations of Satan... Innumerable are the ways by which the mind may be led on to all kind of evil thoughts, by the exciting of external ideas in the imagination. ↗

— Jonathan Edwards

#melancholy #mind #imagination

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

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

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

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

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

I preach that odd defiant melancholy that sees the dreadful loneliness of the human soul and the pitiful disaster of human life as ever redeemable and redeemed by compassion, friendship and love. ↗

— John Derbyshire

#friendship #life #loneliness #love #melancholy