Top 100 Quotes About Melancholy
#1. I feel as if I had been born dead under
American bombardment.
Stefan Bolea
#2. What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?
Soren Kierkegaard
#3. It's how I fill the time when nothing's happening. Thinking too much, flirting with melancholy.
Tim Winton
#4. Nobody thinks mystery writers go around killing people, but they always seem to assume singers are singing about themselves, especially if you write melancholy songs like me.
Del Shannon
#5. John Longridge, the cook at Harley-street, had suffered from low spirits for more than thirty years, and he was quick to welcome Stephen as a newcomer to the freemasonry of melancholy.
Susanna Clarke
#6. I stayed there loving you, though the love made me, not sad but I guess melancholy, for a reason I couldn't point
to.
Daniel Handler
#7. Why is Melancholy like Honey? Because it is very sweet, and it is culled from Flowers.
Hope Mirrlees
#8. Mexico. Melancholy, profoundly right and wrong, it embraces as it strangulates.
Ana Castillo
#9. I could not conjure up one melancholy fancy upon a mutton chop and a glass of champagne.
Jerome K. Jerome
#10. Time brought resignation and a melancholy sweeter than common joy.
Emily Bronte
#11. I don't want to say anything because I know I am unable to protect you from the harm that I see.
Camille Claudel
#12. The conductor shouts "All aboard!" when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over - and it will be called, and will be, "A melancholy accident.
Henry David Thoreau
#13. Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.
Victor Hugo
#14. The value of ourselves is but the value of our melancholy and our disquiet.
Maurice Maeterlinck
#15. That melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal.
Marcel Proust
#16. When you get abandoned by someone, that's the moment when you've truly lost faith in them.
Nicholas Murray
#17. His love with Lucy bled from his heart as he slipped into a dark despair - a melancholy that only she could sever with her chaste voice and tender kisses. Now in an unreachable darkness, a blindness took hold. A blood lust that would drive him mad for five years hence.
Solange Nicole
#18. If there is anybody I detest, it is weak-minded sentimentalists-all those melancholy people who, out of an excess of sympathy for others, miss the thrill of their own essence and drift through life without identity, like a human fog, feeling sorry for everyone.
John Cheever
#19. The words sounded like a mournful incantation.
Dan Simmons
#20. You're going back?" asked Bod. Things that had been immutable were changing. "You're really leaving? But. You're my guardian."
"I was you're guardian. But you are old enough to guard yourself. I have other things to protect.
Neil Gaiman
#21. 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
#22. Such poor liquor do make a man's throat feel very melancholy
and is a disgrace to the name of stimmilent.
Thomas Hardy
#23. Go! you may call it madness, folly; You shall not chase my gloom away! There 's such a charm in melancholy I would not if I could be gay.
Samuel Rogers
#24. He was fairly drunk, and feeling melancholy about all the sinking he had done in the world. Throughout the rough years the Greek alphabet had leaked out of his mind a letter at a time - in fact, the candle of knowledge he had set out with had burned down to a sorry stub.
Larry McMurtry
#25. Nobody ever gets what they want when it comes to love.
Scott Turow
#26. Melancholy has ceased to be an individual phenomenon, an exception. It has become the class privilege of the wage earner, a mass state of mind that finds its cause wherever life is governed by production quotas.
Gunter Grass
#27. He had done nothing on Christmas day, just wandered around outside in the frozen woods. Hard ground, chill winds and bare branches that looked like they'd been dipped in sugar. None of it seemed real, like walking around in a desolate dream, but one he didn't want to wake up from.
R.D. Ronald
#28. He arrived tentatively at his own idea, that melancholy arose from natural, sometimes beneficent forces. Talking about it in plain human terms was his first step toward claiming his own ground as a person who, through no fault of his own, needed help.
Joshua Wolf Shenk
#29. For the air of youth,
Hopeful and cheerful, in thy blood will reign
A melancholy damp of cold and dry
To weigh thy spirits down, and last consume
The balm of life.
John Milton
#30. This land, like so much of the French countryside, was a painting, but Mercier felt his heart touched with melancholy and realized, not for the first time, that beautiful places were hard on lonely people.
Alan Furst
#31. If Heaven a draught of heavenly pleasure spare,
One cordial in this melancholy vale,
'T is when a youthful, loving, modest pair
In other's arms breathe out the tender tale
Robert Burns
#32. In the glass she wore an expression of tense melancholy, for she had come to the depressing conclusion, since the arrival of the Dalloways, that her face was not the face she wanted, and in all probability never would be.
Virginia Woolf
#33. Melancholy persons are foreigners in their mother tongue. The dead language they speak foreshadows their suicide.
David Kyuman Kim
#34. I have the soundtrack for 'A Clockwork Orange,' which is kind of cool. I guess I don't really end up buying a lot of modern soundtracks. Another soundtrack I love is from a French movie called 'Betty Blue.' it has some really melancholy piano work.
James Mercer
#35. It was a gentle love, a tactile love. It was all hands and lips and hearts in tandem. There was motion in our bodies and emotion in our discourse. We were a symphony of melody and melancholy. When you find peace in another's presence, there is no mistaken.
Lang Leav
#36. whose melancholy could be cured only by the spectacle of death, and who had a passion for red blood, as other men have for red wine--the son
Oscar Wilde
#37. When people hit on feeling a certain melancholy or elation, it's a really exciting moment. I think making that connection is the goal, and what makes something great.
Craig Finn
#38. One can't help but be a bit melancholy when you see how the world has changed, and I don't mean that nostalgically.
Lee Radziwill
#39. There's a book that's critical to understanding anxiety, a 17th-century book, 'The Anatomy of Melancholy,' by Robert Burton. I wanted to write something like that.
Scott Stossel
#40. I inherited a vile melancholy from my father, which has made me mad all my life, at least not sober.
Samuel Johnson
#41. Ray Bradbury's connections to fantasy, space, cinema, to the macabre and the melancholy, were all born of his years spent running, jumping, galloping through the woods, across the fields, and down the brick-paved streets of Waukegan.
Sam Weller
#42. I'm a man who struggles with melancholy and depression, but I am a very productive filmmaker and I work constantly, with no pause. Even in the worst of crises, I manage to produce work. And that's keeping me alive.
Jorgen Leth
#43. Under the burning sun on the street I began to feel the weight of my ninety years, and to count minute by minute the minutes of the nights I had left before I died.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#44. We are sealed in our own little melancholy atmospheres, like planets, and revolving around the sun, our common but distant desire.
Jack Kerouac
#45. Melancholy is a sensual pleasure that is deliberately provoked. How many people shut themselves away to make themselves sadder, or to weep beside a stream, or choose a sentimental book! We are constantly building and unbuilding ourselves.
Gustave Flaubert
#46. There is nothing like employment, active indispensable employment, for relieving sorrow. Employment, even melancholy, may dispel melancholy.
Jane Austen
#47. Just as Daisy's house had always seemed to him more mysterious and gay than other houses, so his idea of the city itself, even though she was gone from it, was pervaded with a melancholy beauty.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#48. I think it is the most beautiful and humane thing in the world, so to mingle gravity with pleasure that the one may not sink into melancholy, nor the other rise up into wantonness.
Pliny The Elder
#49. I was a slightly melancholy child and I think films were a way of escaping for me.
Charlie Hunnam
#50. Over all crowds there seems to float a vague distress, an atmosphere of pervasive melancholy, as if any large gathering of people creates an aura of terror and pity.
Emile Zola
#51. A park like this resembles a large, silent, isolated room. In fact it's always Sunday in a park, by the way, for it's always a bit melancholy, and the melancholy stirs up vivid memories of home, and Sunday is something that only ever existed at home, where you were a child.
Robert Walser
#52. In Physic, things of melancholic hue and quality are used against melancholy, sour against sour, salt to remove salt humors.
John Milton
#53. A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#54. I never knew before that religion was such a cheerful thing. I always thought it was kind of melancholy, but Mrs. Allan's isn't, and I'd like to be a Christian if I could be one like her.
L.M. Montgomery
#55. Melancholy is kind of sweet sometimes, I think. It's not a negative thing. It's not a mean thing. It's just something that happens in life, like autumn.
Bill Murray
#56. I tend to want to listen to melancholy music, but sometimes if you're feeling too sad, you can't.
Kim Gordon
#58. Fame is but an inscription on a grave, and glory the melancholy blazon on a coffin lid.
Alexander Smith
#59. The melancholy have the best sense of the comic, the opulent often the best sense of the rustic, the dissolute often the best sense of the moral, and the doubter often the best sense of the religious.
Soren Kierkegaard
#60. Nostalgia is my vice. Nostalgia is a melancholy, and slightly saccharine, sentiment, like tenderness
Isabel Allende
#61. When you write a song, it may come from a personal space, but it very seldom actually represents you. It comes out of a sort of mood of melancholy, somehow. It's almost theatrical.
James Taylor
#62. The room didn't look haunted or eerie now;it was only melancholy in it's faded grandeur.
Elizabeth Peters
#63. We stand in silence for another moment and I realize how lucky I am to have someone I can be myself around in all my melancholy glory.
Marisa Calin
#64. And that dismal cry rose slowly And sank slowly through the air, Full of spirit's melancholy And eternity's despair; And they heard the words it said,- "Pan is dead! great Pan is dead! Pan, Pan is dead!"
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
#65. As ofttimes as it rains on my little spot of earth, you'd think I'd grow accustomed to the gloom.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#66. As a bit of loner, prone to melancholy, with a questionable sexuality, I found great solace in the words of-Dylan, Joni, John Prine and Leonard Cohen. The darker the better.
Jill Sobule
#67. He watched the scene and thought of life; and (as always happened when he thought of life) he became sad. A gentle melancholy took possession of him. He felt how useless it was to struggle against fortune, this being the burden of wisdom which the ages had bequeathed him.
James Joyce
#68. Writing is a defence against boredom, but it's also a cure for melancholy.
Bohumil Hrabal
#69. There are days when I am haunted by a feeling that is blacker than the blackest melancholy. I have a contempt for humanity. I despise the people I have been fated to call my contemporaries. I feel suffocated by their filthy breath.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#70. You felt a deep sorrow, the kind of melancholy you feel when you're in a beautiful place and the sun is going down
Thrity Umrigar
#71. They locked gazes, showing their souls on the edge of their pupils, their melancholy and passionate souls, which death was unable to unite.
Marcel Proust
#72. Well, the musicals give emphasis to love, longing, melancholy, sadness. All of that is always there.
Ismail Merchant
#73. The saxophone does not speak that language. The saxophone speaks the language of the underground, the jaded melancholy of the half-light - grimy and sexy and sweaty and hard. It is the language of orphans and bastards and whores.
Eleanor Catton
#74. I have only one thing to say to the melancholy man: 'Look into the distance.' ... When you look at the stars or the ocean's expanse, your eye is completely relaxed; once your eye is relaxed, your mind is unfettered.
Emile Chartier
#75. A pool of melancholy blooms in my chest and rushes into my body like deep-blue blood.
Ben H. Winters
#76. Cities produce in me melancholy or a tension I don't need.
David Guterson
#77. It is a melancholy illusion of those who write books and articles that the printed word survives. Alas, it rarely does.
Eric Hobsbawm
#78. And did with sighs their fate deplore,
Since I must shelter them no more;
And if before my joys were such,
In having heard, and seen too much,
My grief must be as great and high,
When all abandoned I shall be,
Doomed to a silent destiny.
Aphra Behn
#79. There's a melancholy sense of things lost in the shabbier British seaside towns; of comfortable failure and better times long gone.
Christopher Fowler
#80. Sing of the nature of women, and then the song shall be surely full of variety; old crotchets and most sweet closes. It shall be humorous, grave, fantastic, amorous, melancholy, sprightly, one in all, and all in one.
John Marston
#81. Depression is our way of telling ourselves that something is seriously wrong and needs working through and changing.
Neel Burton
#82. I wish,' said Lymond, 'it would try a major key sometimes.'
'Wind,' Chancellor said, 'is a melancholy creature.
Dorothy Dunnett
#83. Sweet pulp and sour skin -
Or was it sweet outside, and sour within?
Tony Harrison
#84. London, with its monotonous and melancholy houses, seems like an inharmonious patchwork, as if pieced together without design. Yet it is lovable in its sprawling confusion.
Joseph Fort Newton
#85. the rank and melancholy smell of charred wet wood and sodden leaves coming towards me on a wisp of air.
Daphne Du Maurier
#86. He was persuaded he could know no happiness but in the society of one with whom he could for ever indulge the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul.
Horace Walpole
#87. Only the long melancholy call to prayer, or the wail of women over the dead, or the barking of dogs, breaks the silence which at sunset falls as a pall over Baghdad.
Isabella Bird
#88. Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
John Keats
#89. Feelings, she learned, were hard to fight. She treasured his smiles and compliments and tried not to dwell on the fact that he gave this things to his friend Kel.
His dreamy-eyed gazes, poems, and fits of passionate melancholy were for Uline. It was hard not to resent the older girl.
Tamora Pierce
#90. Death wasn't something to romanticize. It was something to stave off, to avoid, to fight as long as possible. Even though she had her battles with melancholy, she never seriously considered suicide. Something in her trusted that there would be an upswing and it would be worth waiting for.
Meredith Marple
#91. Sweet recreation barred, what doth ensue but moody and dull melancholy, kinsman to grim and comfortless despair.
William Shakespeare
#92. The band had morphed into another sweet melancholy song. "I'm Not Supposed To Love You Anymore." If that wasn't the voice of God, I didn't know what was.
Kristan Higgins
#93. There's only one lesson to be learned form life, anyway," interrupted Gloria, not in contradiction but in a sort of melancholy agreement.
"What's that?" demanded Maury sharply.
"That there's no lesson to be learned from life.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#94. Dogs were generally incompatible with melancholy.
John Connolly
#96. I think Paris smells not just sweet but melancholy and curious, sometimes sad but always enticing and seductive. She's a city for the all senses, for artists and writers and musicians and dreamers, for fantasies, for long walks and wine and lovers and, yes, for mysteries.
M.J. Rose
#97. For youth, the moon is a promise of all those tremendous things which await it, for older people a memento that the promise was never kept, a reminder of all that broke and went to pieces ...
And what is moonshine? Secondhand sunshine. Diluted, counterfeit.
Hjalmar Soderberg
#98. I want to do drawings which touch some people ... In either figure or landscape I wish to express, not sentimental melancholy, but serious sorrow.
Vincent Van Gogh
#99. Once or twice a day, I am enveloped inside what I like to call the Impenetrable Shield of Melancholy. This shield, it is impenetrable. Hence the name. I cannot speak. And while I can feel myself freeze up, I can't do anything about it.
Sarah Vowell
#100. During our visits, he consumed an embarrassingly varied assortment of cheap beer and wine, vacillating between fury and melancholy as one might imagine Richard Nixon to be doing not far away. Sometimes he choked on his emotions so badly I feared I would have to perform the Heimlich maneuver on him.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
