Melancholy quotations

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◆ What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?

- S?ren Kierkegaard99

◆ A melancholy-looking man, he had the appearance of one who has searched for the leak in life's gas-pipe with a lighted candle.

- P.G. Wodehouse99

◆ Melancholy is the pleasure of being sad.

- Victor Hugo99

◆ Depression is melancholy minus its charms.

- Susan Sontag99

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

- Percy Bysshe Shelley99

◆ Melancholy suicide. —This is connected with a general state of extreme depression and exaggerated sadness, causing the patient no longer to realize sanely the bonds which connect him with people and things about him. Pleasures no longer attract;

- émile Durkheim99

◆ Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.

- Italo Calvino99

◆ Melancholia is, I believe, a musical problem: a dissonance, a change in rhythm. While on the outside everything happens with the vertiginous rhythm of a cataract, on the inside is the exhausted adagio of drops of water falling from time to tired time. For this reason the outside, seen from the melancholic inside, appears absurd and unreal, and constitutes ‘the farce we all must play'. But for an instant – because of a wild music, or a drug, or the sexual act carried to its climax – the very slow rhythm of the melancholic soul does not only rise to that of the outside world: it overtakes it with an ineffably blissful exorbitance, and the soul then thrills animated by delirious new energies

- Alejandra Pizarnik99

◆ For some nights I slept profoundly; but still every morning I felt the same lassitude, and a languor weighed upon me all day. I felt myself a changed girl. A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was slowly sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome possession of me. If it was sad, the tone of mind which this induced was also sweet. Whatever it might be, my soul acquiesced in it.

- Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu99

◆ I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity but to mature and transfigure us.

- Hermann Hesse99

◆ The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving.

- Oscar Wilde99

◆ I wish to cry. Yet, I laugh, and my lipstick leaves a red stain like a bloody crescent moon on the top of the beer can.

- Sylvia Plath99

◆ The soulless have no need of melancholia

- Vladimir Odoevsky99

◆ And, at such a time, for a few of us there will always be a tugging at the heart—knowing a precious moment had gone and we not there. We can ask and ask but we can't have again what once seemed ours for ever—the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on belfry floor, a remembered voice, a loved face. They've gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.

- J.L. Carr99

◆ Autumn is as joyful and sweet as an untimely end.

- Remy de Gourmont99