“Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.”
Melancholic feeling
Melancholic Quotes — page 173 of 412
“Years do not always make age.”
“One wastes so much time, one is so prodigal of life, at twenty! Our days of winter count for double. That is the compensation of the old.”
“The value of liberty was thus enhanced in our estimation by the difficulty of its attainment, and the worth of characters appreciated by the trial of adversity.”
“Like all truly pure souls she [Chantal] quickly resigned herself to past faults, thought only of how to repair whatever harm they had done. "Of all my daughters, you are certainly the least bothered by scruples of conscience," Abbé Chevance used to say.... Even sin, once the will is detached and no longer nourishes it, withers and dies sterile. It is in the secret of intentions, like in a decomposing humus, in the dark forest of future sins, unpardoned sins, half dead, half living, that new poisons are distilled.”
“Being seventy is not a sin. It's not a joy, either.”
“It isn't so much that hard times are coming; the change observed is mostly soft times going.”
“… Her heart remained empty once more, and the procession of days all alike began again. So they were going to follow one another, like this, in line, always identical, innumerable, bringing nothing!”
“Caught up in life, you see it badly. You suffer from it or enjoy it too much. The artist, in my opinion, is a monstrosity, something outside of nature.”
“Le charme de la nouveaute , peu a' peu tombant comme un ve" t ement, laissait voir a' nu l'e ternelle monotonie de la passion, qui a toujours les me" mes formes et le me" me langage. The charm of novelty, falling little by little like a robe, revealed the eternal monotony of passion, which has always the same forms and the same language.”
“On the way I stood a moment looking out across the marshes with tall cattails, a patch of water, more marsh, then the woods with a few birch trees shining white at the edge on beyond. In the darkness it all looked just like I felt. Wet and swampy and gloomy, very gloomy. In the morning I painted it. My memory of it is that it was probably my best painting that summer.”
“No," said the priest, "you don't need to accept everything as true, you only have to accept it as necessary." "Depressing view," said K. "The lie made into the rule of the world.”
“Because of impatience we were driven out [of Paradise]; because of impatience we cannot return.”
“It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable.”
“Rust rust rust in the engines of love and time.”
“When a role for a young guy is being offered to me, I think of River Phoenix. It feels like a loss.”
“Wood feeds the fire which burns it.”
“My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.”
“I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?”
“Alas! how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape!”