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Quotes About Melancholy

This mournful and restless sound was a fit accompaniment to my meditations.
~ Joseph Conrad
And at last, in its curved and imperceptible fall, the sun sank low, and from glowing white changed to a dull red without rays and without heat, as if about to go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brooding over a crowd of men.
~ Joseph Conrad
The men we met walked past, slow, unsmiling, with downcast eyes, as if the melancholy of a over-burdened earth had weighted their feet, bowed their shoulders, borne down their glances
~ Joseph Conrad
She was the epitome of stately sorrow each time she smiled.
~ Joseph Heller
Why is it that all men who have become outstanding in philosophy, statesmanship, poetry or the arts are melancholic
~ Joshua Wolf Shenk
A person with a melancholy temperament had been fated with both an awful burden and what Byron called "a fearful gift." The burden was a sadness and despair that could tip into a state of disease. But the gift was a capacity for depth, wisdom—even genius.
~ Joshua Wolf Shenk
Whatever greatness Lincoln achieved cannot be explained as a triumph over personal suffering. Rather, it must be accounted for as an outgrowth of the same system that produced that suffering. This is not a story of transformation but one of integration. Lincoln didn't do great work because he solved the problem of his melancholy. The problem of his melancholy was all the more fuel for the fire of his great work.
~ Joshua Wolf Shenk
In Lincoln's middle years, a loud insistence on his own woe evolved into a quiet, disciplined yearning. He yoked his feelings to a style of severe self-control, articulating a melancholy that was, more than anything, philosophical. He saw the world as a sad, difficult place from which he expected considerable suffering.
~ Joshua Wolf Shenk
A person with a melancholy temperament had been fated with both an awful burden and what Byron called "a fearful gift." The burden was a sadness and despair that could tip into a state of disease. But the gift was a capacity for depth, wisdom—even genius.   In
~ Joshua Wolf Shenk
A creeping fear of madness often accompanies depression. Sufferers wonder if their black moods will ever lift, or if their feelings of alienation from the healthy world will deepen and widen. "These fears are at least fifty percent of what it is to be melancholy
~ Joshua Wolf Shenk
It may be that actual tears have stained the tile floors or soaked into the carpets of such places. It may be that these tears can never be removed. And everywhere the odor of melancholy, that is the very odor of memory.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
There's a sort of melancholy romance to the experience of being lonesome. I think of reading as a kind of romantic alone activity that you're doing. The image would include being curled up somewhere on a rainy day and you're reading very intensely involved in a world that no one can see because it's inside your head.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
Alone, alone! Long she would recall the strangeness of the word, an echo aerated by melancholy vowels—alone. AT
~ Joyce Carol Oates
After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things.... It is difficult even to choose the adjective For this blank cold, this sadness without cause...
~ Wallace Stevens
Youngish artists have a way of being melancholy. It may be that this is merely a symptom of the distress they feel at the absence of definition. They have no very distinct outline either of themselves or of the abstractions that bedevil them. They are, in short, likely to be a bit baffled.
~ Wallace Stevens
From Secret Man The man of autumn, Behind its melancholy mask, Will laugh in the brown grass, Will shout from the tower's rim.
~ Wallace Stevens
The salt hung on his spirit like a frost, The dead brine melted in him like a dew Of winter, until nothing of himself Remained, except some starker, barer self In a starker, barer world, in which the sun Was not the sun because it never shone With bland complaisance...
~ Wallace Stevens
Joy (p?ti), the quality quite contrary to the pessimistic, gloomy or melancholic attitude of mind.
~ Walpola Rahula
Nought but vast sorrow was there—The sweet cheat gone.
~ Walter de La Mare
Wer einmal gelernt hat, in der Melancholie zu Hause zu sein, der kann es selbst in der schlechtesten aller Welten aushalten. Gute Lektüre, schwarzen Humor und gesunde, gut abgehangene Melancholie, mehr braucht man eigentlich nicht.
~ Walter Moers
paroxysms of weeping.
~ Walter Moers
But probably my favorite music, believe it or not, is sad music.
~ Walton Goggins
She sat for a few minutes in the company of her bitter regrets...
~ Wanda E. Brunstetter
He explained what he saw in her eyes, which was not sadness or disappointment but understanding. Sympathy, he said, and wit. At some level sympathy implied knowledge and knowledge had a melancholy aspect. He believed that was universally true, no exceptions. When you knew too much you felt a natural distress but that was something quite different from fundamental personal sadness, sadness as a trait, like blue eyes. Her distress was not temperamental but intellectual.
~ Ward Just