“It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are as significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less a moth eaten man who grinds an organ - and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory.”
Melancholic feeling
Melancholic Quotes — page 168 of 412
“My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness.”
“You can’t repeat the past.” “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”
“Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.”
“One of the dreariest spots on life's road is the point of conviction that nothing will ever again happen to you.”
“I was a handful growing up.”
“I said from the very beginning, I don't want a big house, I don't want big grounds, I don't want the trouble with the maintenance and all of that.”
“What it boils down to is that each person has his own ways of coping with trauma and grief, with the pain of life, and astrology was one of mine. Don't criticize me, I wanted to say, until you have stood in my place. This helped me. Nobody was hurt by it.”
“After 50, the rock 'n' roll road is a little absurd. It's very difficult to play these little places. You're out there on a rickety old bus with no place to shower.”
“I have so often been mistaken that I no longer blush for it”
“A celebrated people lose dignity upon a closer view.”
“Sometimes I look back at myself and remember things I used to say, or my hairstyle, and I cringe.”
“In my coming-of-age time, there was no internet, no social networking, nothing. It was just show after show, hoping one day somebody would notice you.”
“Nowadays New-York is not the exciting place it used to be. It still has great energy; I still put my finger in the socket. But it doesn't feel alive, cracking with that synergy between the art world and music world and fashion world that was happening in the 80s. A lot of people died.”
“Where now are the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing? Where is the harp on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing? Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing? They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow; The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow. Who shall gather the smoke of the deadwood burning, Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?”
“I couldn't possibly have lived all the things that Ice-T on the records lived.”
“My decision to view the world through novels, as it were, which is a typically European way of looking at things, became a heavy burden for me. But I took it on consciously, even though it was torture for me.”
“I think we're a kind of desperation. We're sort of a maddening luxury. The basic and essential human is the woman, and all that we're doing is trying to brighten up the place. That's why all the birds who belong to our sex have prettier feathers - because males have got to try and justify their existence.”
“The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left.”
“At twenty-one, so many things appear solid, permanent, untenable.”