“I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the "warehouse of good intentions": "Can't do it now." "Then put it on hold." This is one's strategy for coping with old age, and with death--because one can't die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses.”
Melancholic feeling
Melancholic Quotes — page 165 of 412
“Knowledge of the soul would unfailingly make us melancholy if the pleasures of expression did not keep us alert and of good cheer.”
“Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success, and they are in such a hurry to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them, they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity.”
“What if we have more of the rough file, if we have less rust! Afflictions carry away nothing but the dross of sin.”
“We spend our years with sighing; it is a valleyof tears; but death is the funeral of all our sorrows.”
“Diabetes is caused by melancholy.”
“[Camila] was quite incapable of establishing any harmony between the claims of her art, of her appetites, or her dreams, and of her crowded daily routine. Each of these was a world in itself.”
“I didn't quit football because I failed a drug test, I failed a test because I was ready to quite football.”
“When I was 21 years old, I had a job playing Santa Claus in a shopping centre in Sacramento. I was rail thin, so it's not like I was a traditional Santa Claus even then. I had a square stomach; that was the shape of the sofa cushion that I had stuffed into my pants.”
“Not becoming 'something' scares me the most. I just want to be remembered for something great.”
“Nothing could be taken for granted. Women who loved you tried to cut your throat, while women who didn't even know your name scrubbed your back. Witches could sound like Katharine Hepburn and your best friend could try to strangle you. Smack in the middle of an orchid there might be a blob of jello and inside a Mickey Mouse doll, a fixed and radiant star.”
“It's the same with men as with horses and dogs, nothing wants to die.”
“It's a battered old suitcase to a hotel someplace, and a wound that will never heal. No prima donna, the perfume is on an old shirt that is stained with blood and whiskey. Goodnight to the street sweepers, the night watchmen flame keepers and goodnight, Matilda, too.”
“The observations and encounters of a devotee of solitude and silence are at once less distinct and more penetrating than those of the sociable man; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. Images and perceptions which might otherwise be easily dispelled by a glance, a laugh, an exchange of comments, concern him unduly, they sink into mute depths, take on significance, become experiences, adventures, emotions.”
“You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.”
“If I ever grow up, I don't want to be around for it.”
“There is nothing more despicable than an old man who has no other proof than his age to offer of his having lived long in the world.”
“Retirement without the love of letters is a living burial.”
“So called pleasures, when they go beyond a certain limit, are but punishments.”
“As fate is inexorable, and not to be moved either with tears or reproaches, an excess of sorrow is as foolish as profuse laughter; while, on the other hand, not to mourn at all is insensibility.”