100 Quotes About Melancholy

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

I am my heart’s undertaker. Daily I go and retrieve its tattered remains, place them delicately into its little coffin, and bury it in the depths of my memory, only to have to do it all again tomorrow. Emilie Autumn

I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone. Daniel Keyes

Youth is an intoxication without wine, someone says. Life is an intoxication. The only sober man is the melancholiac, who, disenchanted, looks at life, sees it as it really is, and cuts his throat. If this be so, I want to be very drunk. The great thing is to live, to clutch at our existence and race away with it in some great and enthralling pursuit. Above all, I must beware of all ultimate questions- they are too maddeningly unanswerable- let me eschew philosophy and burn Omar. W.N.P. Barbellion

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. Carr

There's little of the melancholy element in her, my lord: she is never sad but when she sleeps; and not ever sad then; for I have heard my daughter say, she hath often dreamt of unhappiness, and waked herself with laughing. William Shakespeare

Não conseguia pensar em nada que desejasse especialmente na vida, excepto aquelas faíscas de cor púrpura - aquelas flores de fogo desabrochando selvaticamente -; daria a vida para poder segurá-las- Akutagawa Ryunosuke

She quite liked this aspect of her personality, the way her mood could change from melancholy to euphoric because of a breeze or a flavor or a beautiful chord progression. It meant she never had to feel too down about feeling down. Liane Moriarty

I often wish I'd got on better with your father, ' he said. But he never liked anyone who--our friends, ' said Clarissa; and could have bitten her tongue for thus reminding Peter that he had wanted to marry her. Of course I did, thought Peter; it almost broke my heart too, he thought; and was overcome with his own grief, which rose like a moon looked at from a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from the sunken day. I was more unhappy than I've ever been since, he thought. And as if in truth he were sitting there on the terrace he edged a little towards Clarissa; put his hand out; raised it; let it fall. There above them it hung, that moon. She too seemed to be sitting with him on the terrace, in the moonlight. . Virginia Woolf

I'd like to die listening to a piece of music. I imagine this as so easy, so natural, but naturally it's quite impossible. Notes stab too softly. The wounds they leave behind may smart, but they don't fester. Melancholy and pain trickle out instead of blood. When the notes cease, all is peaceful within me again. Robert Walser

Cyrano: The leaves--- Roxane: What color--- Perfect Venetian red! Look at them fall. Cyrano: Yes---they know how to die. A little way From the branch to the earth, a little fear Of mingling with the common dust---and yet They go down gracefully---a fall that seems Like flying! Edmond Rostand

He suffered greatly from being shut up among all these people whose stupidity and absurdities wounded him all the more cruelly since, being ignorant of his love, incapable, had they known of it, of taking any interest, or of doing more than smile at it as at some childish joke, or deplore it as an act of insanity, they made it appear to him in the aspect of a subjective state which existed for himself alone, whose reality there was nothing external to confirm; he suffered overwhelmingly, to the point at which even the sound of the instruments made him want to cry, from having to prolong his exile in this place to which Odette would never come, in which no one, nothing was aware of her existence, from which she was entirely absent. Marcel Proust

To this day when I inhale a light scent of Wrangler–its sweet sharpness–or the stronger, darker scent of Musk, I return to those hours and it ceases to be just cologne that I take in but the very scent of age, of youth at its most beautiful peak. It bears the memory of possibility, of unknown forests, unchartered territories, and a heart light and skipping, hell-bent as the captain of any of the three ships, determined at all costs to prevail to the new world. Turning back was no option. Whatever the gales, whatever the emaciation, whatever the casualty to self, onward I kept my course. My heart felt the magnetism of its own compass guiding me on–its direction constant and sure. There was no other way through. I feel it again as once it had been, before it was broken-in; its strength and resolute ardency. The years of solitude were nothing compared to what lay ahead. In sailing for the horizon that part of my life had been sealed up, a gentle eddy, a trough of gentle waves diminishing further, receding away. Whatever loneliness andpain went with the years between the ages of 14 and 20, was closed, irretrievable– I was already cast in form and direction in a certain course. When I open the little bottle of eau de toilette five hundred different days unfold within me, conversations so strained, breaking slowly, so painstakingly, to a comfortable place. A place so warm and inviting after the years of silence and introspect, of hiding. A place in the sun that would burn me alive before I let it cast a shadow on me. Until that time I had not known, I had not been conscious of my loneliness. Yes, I had been taciturn in school, alone, I had set myself apart when others tried to engage. But though I was alone, I had not felt the pangs of loneliness. It had not burdened or tormented as such when I first felt the clear tang of its opposite in the form of another’s company. Of Regn’s company. We came, each in our own way, in our own need–listening, wanting, tentatively, as though we came upon each other from the side in spite of having seen each other head on for two years. It was a gradual advance, much again like a vessel waiting for its sails to catch wind, grasping hold of the ropes and learning much too quickly, all at once, how to move in a certain direction. There was no practicing. It was everything and all–for the first and last time. Everything had to be right, whether it was or not. The waters were beautiful, the work harder than anything in my life, but the very glimpse of any tempest of defeat was never in my line of vision. I’d never failed at anything. And though this may sound quite an exaggeration, I tell you earnestly, it is true. Everything to this point I’d ever set my mind to, I’d achieved. But this wasn’t about conquering some land, nor had any of my other desires ever been about proving something. It just had to be– I could not break, could not turn or retract once I’d committed myself to my course. You cannot force a clock to run backwards when it is made to persevere always, and ever, forward. Had I not been so young I’d never have had the courage to love her. . Wheston Chancellor Grove

Looking back on months and years of intimacy, to feel that your friend, while you still remember the moving words you exchanged, is yet growing distant and living in a world apart–all this is sadder far than partings brought by death. Unknown

She said once that time is nothing to me but a series of bookmarks that I use to jump back and forth through the text of my life, returning again and again to the events that mark me in the eyes of my more astute colleagues, as bearing all the characteristics of the classic melancholic. Dennis Lehane

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; Unknown

You're back where you swore yourself you wouldn't be The familiar shackles you can't tell from your own skin Your head's under water when you learned to swim On a road to hell, congratulations, you're free... Sanhita Baruah

Tom began screaming, and I wondered if the baby's soft brain was, in this moment, changing shape in response to the violent stimuli. I tried to intellectualize the noise to protect the baby's psyche. I whispered: Isn't that interesting to hear a man scream? Doesn't that challenge our stereotypes of what men can do? And then I tried, Shhhhhhhhh. Miranda July

She had never looked as well. She had entered her room as just an impossibly lovely girl. The woman who emerged was a trifle thinner, a great deal wiser, an ocean sadder. This one understood the nature of pain, and beneath the glory of her features, there was character, and a sure knowledge of suffering. William Goldman

And what the music elicits–in me, in most everyone who hears it and takes to it–is a strangely comforting, sensual melancholy, a gentle sadness, the kind that comes with soft rain. It’s the same for all truly great dark art. There’s a pleasure in seeing our shadows paraded beautifully. It’s liberating to find them so prettily decked out, a sort of reverse Halloween. William Todd Schultz

He sank back into his black-and-white world, his immobile world of inanimate drawings that had been granted the secret of motion, his death-world with its hidden gift of life. But that life was a deeply ambiguous life, a conjurer's trick, a crafty illusion based on an accidental property of the retina, which retained an image for a fraction of a second after the image was no longer present. On this frail fact was erected the entire structure of the cinema, that colossal confidence game. The animated cartoon was a far more honest expression of the cinematic illusion than the so-called realistic film, because the cartoon reveled in its own illusory nature, exulted in the impossible--indeed it claimed the impossible as its own, exalted it as its own highest end, found in impossibility, in the negation of the actual, its profoundest reason for being. The animated cartoon was nothing but the poetry of the impossible--therein lay its exhilaration and its secret melancholy. For this willful violation of the actual, while it was an intoxicating release from the constriction of things, was at the same time nothing but a delusion, an attempt to outwit mortality. As such it was doomed to failure. And yet it was desperately important to smash through the constriction of the actual, to unhinge the universe and let the impossible stream in, because otherwise--well, otherwise the world was nothing but an editorial cartoon. Steven Millhauser

I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom. Edgar Allan Poe

A light which lives on what the flames devour, a grey landscape surrounding me with scorch, a crucifixion by a single wound, a sky and earth that darken by each hour, a sob of blood whose red ribbon adornsa lyre without a pulse, and oils the torch, a tide which stuns and strands me on the reef, a scorpion scrambling, stinging in my chest--this is the wreath of love, this bed of thornsis where I dream of you stealing my rest, haunting these sunken ribs cargoed with grief. I sought the peak of prudence, but I foundthe hemlock-brimming valley of your heart, and my own thirst for bitter truth an . Unknown

Some pain has no relief, it can only be sealed You can grasp the wound to feel the scar unhealed. Munia Khan

Night has enveloped, to give me some reliefnow invisible are walls of separation, and thy griefwhere blood quenches the thirstdisloyalty is faith last and firstis the religion my beloved belongs to I beckoned, red and black robed lady with a wandlet me take her by the handheard of her about sorceryher powers useless, and witch now about to succumbfrom just a gaze of eyes filled with Kohl of Leilamy nights worthless, body breathlessevery moment, feeling restlessbe silent and hear, hear me, my criesdon't forget the promise you swore I have lost my childhood over youdon't know, how these years left me alonesufferings, separation, theft me alone I never knew how pain excrutiatessometimes, i enlivened you my dear Love is a blessing, and not a fearin a melancholy cloudy day, I mournglistening eyes, weeping sky, and heart torn I gaze from a window in KashmirFor a moment, condoling the tragedy, sighing In sombre time, lifeless, as if dying . Unknown

Night never needs a shade but it requires to fade into the grin of twinkling stars where light is just a glint of scars Munia Khan

When sadness knows the reason of tears, heart prepares to carry the ache for years Munia Khan

I am Broken single mother Disconnected lover Slow motion dresser Dark secret confessor White flag trend Professional dead end Casey Renee Kiser

What if you are just destined to get hurt, to be helplessly stuck in a point of time you no longer want to be? Maybe life is all about trying to get up while you fall a little bit deeper in the pits of hell, each time you try not to... Sanhita Baruah

One's suffering, one's melancholy is, in itself, really only looked upon as failure or as punishment, as detestable or sinful or socially unacceptable in the eyes of man; but this is not so in the eyes of God: for He is close to the broken-hearted. Criss Jami

..her own restless coveting of his love and the slow but sure ebullience of her desire for him; then the Nawab's martydom and her spiritual homelessness and physical loneliness; there was so much, so many portraits and landscapes, like the bright pages of an album of words and pictures. They filled her heart overflowing with the tangy, coppery taste of blood that flows from failure, and pricked her soul with nostalgia, for what was and what could have been. She had never thought that happy memories could come accompanied with so much regret, so much pain, so much repining, and discontent. If you plucked a rose without due care, its thorn pricked you to protest the thoughtlessness and the inconsiderateness you had displayed in taking away its crowning glory. Here, it was nothing else but the rose which was the thorn: its each and every petal was saturated with the scents of the past but it stung like the scorpion plant. But was it possible not to touch those memories? For their scents traveled in and out of your being like breath, and their colours were inside every blink of your eye. Shamsur Rahman Faruqi

Only pain can define the meaning of tears. Munia Khan

To be happy to be sad and sad to be happy is to sing an echo in that beautiful language called Sorrow. Criss Jami

We're just two lost souls Swimming in a fish bowl, Year after year, Running over the same old ground. What have we found? The same old fears. Wish you were here. Roger Waters

.. . Like ashes of gold in a cinnamon-flame, My youthful desires have been burnt with the years— And tonight in the chilling sunset-wind A cicada, singing, weighs on my heart. Haoran Meng

The sick constriction of the heart was undeniable; there was a melancholy truth in the fact that it was suffering which made me, I thought, at last real to myself. Alfred Hayes

My world is a million shattered pieces put together, glued by my tears, where each piece is nothing but a reflection of YOU. Sanhita Baruah

Her voice was soft and numinous, as befitted any Aizian singer, yet it was not just bells and melody. There was something else in her tune, a strand of solemnity that no Aizian could possess, for it yearned for something far away, whereas Aizians needed only open their eyes to behold the greatest wonders. Yes, she was in Aizai now, but she hadn’t always been, and for how much longer was impossible to say. MaryJean Harris

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

I, sometimes, fear that probably I'll just keep changing cities, and may be someday I'll also travel the world, but never find another soul who thinks exactly the way I do. Sanhita Baruah

And truths, these days, are spoken The same way promises are made, With gritted teeth and crossed fingers. Sanhita Baruah

I thought I would marry my boyfriend and grow old and sick of him. I thought I would keep my friends, and we'd make different, new memories. None of that happened. Better things happened. Then why am I so sad? Lena Dunham

Melancholy is an escape not from reality, but unreality of the world. Raheel Farooq

The melancholy river bears us on. When the moon comes through the trailing willow boughs, I see your face, I hear your voice and the bird singing as we pass the osier bed. What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Woven together, like reeds in moonlight. Virginia Woolf

Sometimes we learn the lessons of life through pain, melancholy and the vicissitude of life and sometimes we learn the lessons of life through joy and comfort. Whatever the case may be, the most important thing is the great lesson we learn out of the lessons life teaches us. If you fail to learn the lessons greatly, life will teach you a great lesson. Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Sometimes we learn the lessons of life through pain, melancholy and the vicissitude of life and sometimes we learn the lessons of life through joy and comfort. Whatever be the case, the most important thing is the great lesson we learn out of the lessons life teaches us. If you fail to learn the lessons greatly, life will teach you a great lesson. Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Listen thoughtfullysounds of laughtergaiety and melancholy galore Archana Chaurasia Kapoor

That's most interesting. But I was no more a mind-reader then than today. Iwas weeping for an altogether different reason. When I watched you dancing that day, I saw something else. I saw a new world coming rapidly. Morescientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But aharsh, cruel world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could notremain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go. That is what I saw. It wasn't really you, what you were doing, I know that. But I saw you and it broke my heart. And I've never forgotten. Kazuo Ishiguro

My sadness is beautiful. It infuses everything I do. It is at the core of my identity and always has been, just as happiness is in some people. I refuse to be told that it's a flaw. I will not mute it with medications for the sake of society. I will hold it close to me and celebrate it rightfully while the rest of the world fails to see it for what it is and it will be their loss. Ashly Lorenzana

Even when it seems that there is no one else, always remember there's one person who never ceased to love you - yourself. Sanhita Baruah

Years have passed, I suppose. I'm not really counting them anymore. But I think of this thing often: Perhaps there is a Golden Age someplace, a Renaissance for me sometime, a special time somewhere, somewhere but a ticket, a visa, a diary-page away. I don't know where or when. Who does? Where are all the rains of yesterday? In the invisible city? Inside me? It is cold and quiet outside and the horizon is infinity. There is no sense of movement. There is no moon, and the stars are very bright, like broken diamonds, all. . Roger Zelazny

She made him yearn for a future his kind could never have, and a connection he sure as hell didn’t deserve. Katherine McIntyre

I wrote when I did not know life;now that I know life, I have no more to say. Oscar Wilde

The words sounded like a mournful incantation. Dan Simmons

Despite her words about letting go, melancholy washed over her. Because words are easy and often thrown around with trite intentions. A. Lynn

Depression is melancholy minus its charms. Susan Sontag

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 Pizarnik

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. Unknown

The soulless have no need of melancholia Vladimir Odoyevsky

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

Still, somewhere in the depths of ourselves we all harbor an ashamed, unsatisfied melancholy that quietly awaits a funeral. JeanPaul Sartre

Like a deep sad noteplayed beneath the oceanwaving through the orbthe memories of youthe bittersweet echoesinfixed forever in my heart Pawan Mishra

What was wrong with Rhiannon Thomas

A hand-rolled cigarette to smoke, Another one bought from the store. If he lights one, his mind's lit up Another one burns a hole.. Sanhita Baruah

He cries behind his wall, I think, and no one knows, not even he. And no one will ever know, and in the end he’ll always be alone in smiling pain. George R.r. Martin

Probably you were not quite well, my little dove, when you wrote to me, for a note of real melancholy pervaded your letter. I recognized in it a nature closely akin to my own. I know the feeling only too well. In my life, too, there are days, hours, weeks, aye, and months, in which everything looks black, when I am tormented by the thought that I am forsaken, that no one cares for me. Indeed, my life is of little worth to anyone. Were I to vanish from the face of the earth to-day, it would be no great loss to Russian music, and would certainly cause no one great unhappiness. In short, I live a selfish bachelor’s life. I work for myself alone, and care only for myself. This is certainly very comfortable, although dull, narrow, and lifeless. But that you, who are indispensable to so many whose happiness you make, that you can give way to depression, is more than I can believe. How can you doubt for a moment the love and esteem of those who surround you? How could it be possible not to love you? No, there is no one in the world more dearly loved than you are. As for me, it would be absurd to speak of my love for you. If I care for anyone, it is for you, for your family, for my brothers and our old Dad. I love you all, not because you are my relations, but because you are the best people in the world. Modest Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Depression is our way of telling ourselves that something is seriously wrong and needs working through and changing. Neel Burton

Waking up breaks my heart. Getting dressed breaks my arms. Joining the crowd breaks my legs. Letting someone in...does me in. Casey Renee Kiser

I love rainstorms...the thunder, lightning, wind, all of it. So much going on at once, so many emotions...just like me. April Mae Monterrosa

The author says that when an angry impulse is not immediately expressed, it turns to melancholy. Patrick OBrian

If you tell someone you have depression, they will often say, "Oh, I've been depressed before, too." The difference lies between being depressed and having depression. Everyone's been depressed at one time or another, but these are far from being the same things. One is a passing mood. The other is a chronic illness that does not come and go, ebb and flow, is here one day and gone the next. The difference between being depressed and having depression is that one is a mood and the other is an illness. One is a momentary bout of melancholy. The other is a debilitating condition that requires medical treatment. Would you feel better about having a cancerous lesion if I likened it to the rash I had last week? The difference between being depressed and having depression is the difference between a mood that will soon pass, and a serious illness that disrupts your ability to function and will take years to treat. The difference between being depressed and having depression is the difference between Cleveland and Bangkok, or your frying pan and the surface of the sun. So, no, we (depressives) do not feel better when you tell us about your rash. We'll do our best to be polite about it, but no, it really doesn't help at all. Northern Adams

Rain is a lullaby heard through a thick, isolating blanket of clouds. It is the tinkling harp of water droplets; a moist breath whistling through willow reeds; a pattering beat background to the mourner's melody. Rain is a soft song of compassion for the brokenhearted. Richelle E. Goodrich

Melancholy held me hostage, and the bees built a hive of sadness in my soul. Laurie Halse Anderson

When people call it that I always get pissed off because I always think depression sounds like you just get like really sad, you get quiet and melancholy and just like sit quietly by the window sighing or just lying around. A state of not caring about anything. A kind of blue kind of peaceful state. David Foster Wallace

As ofttimes as it rains on my little spot of earth, you'd think I'd grow accustomed to the gloom. Richelle E. Goodrich

The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true-- not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. . Herman Melville