#press

The diabolical thing about melancholy is not that it makes you ill but that it makes you conceited and shortsighted; yes almost arrogant. You lapse into bad taste, thinking of yourself as Heine's Atlas, whose shoulders support all the world's puzzles and agonies, as if thousands, lost in the same maze, did not endure the same agonies. ↗

— Hermann Hesse

#melancholy

An unchangeable colour rules over the melancholic: his dwelling is a space the colour of mourning. Nothing happens in it. No one intrudes. It is a bare stage where the inert I is assisted by the I suffering from that inertia. The latter wishes to free the former, but all efforts fail, as Theseus would have failed had he been not only himself but also the Minotaur; to kill him then, he would have had to kill himself ↗

— Alejandra Pizarnik

#melancholy #melancholy

Mental illness is so much more complicated than any pill that any mortal could invent ↗

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

#nationalism

Everything's plastic, we're all going to die sooner or later, so what does it matter. ↗

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

#prozac-nation #nationalism

In my case, I was not frightened in the least bit at the thought that I might live because I was certain, quite certain, that I was already dead. ↗

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

#nationalism

I have never been able to understand the complaint that a story is "depressing" because of its subject matter. What depresses me are stories that don't seem to know these things go on, or hide them in resolute chipperness; "witty stories," in which every problem is the occasion for a joke; "upbeat" stories that flog you with transcendence. Please. We're grown ups now. ↗

— Tobias Wolff

#witty

Never ask while you are doing it if what you are doing is fun. Don't introduce even your most reliably witty acquaintance as someone who will set the table on a roar. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#fun #pressure #wit #witty

Black people don't have an accurate idea of their history, which has been either suppressed or distorted. ↗

— Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

#been #black #distorted #either #history

Men of few words are the best men." (3.2.41) ↗

— William Shakespeare

#expression #speaking #taciturnity #words #men

Love him,’ said Jacques, with vehemence, ‘love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters? And how long, at the best, can it last, since you are both men and still have everywhere to go? Only five minutes, I assure you, only five minutes, and most of that, helas! in the dark. And if you think of them as dirty, then they will be dirty— they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing, you will be despising your flesh and his. But you can make your time together anything but dirty, you can give each other something which will make both of you better—forever—if you will not be ashamed, if you will only not play it safe.’ He paused, watching me, and then looked down to his cognac. ‘You play it safe long enough,’ he said, in a different tone, ‘and you’ll end up trapped in your own dirty body, forever and forever and forever—like me. ↗

— James Baldwin

#love #love