“Along the wide curving moat surrounding the palace, rows of cherry trees announced the end of their seasonal beauty. Some of the trees were weeping: blossoms in white and palest pink, ponderous with decreptitude, eddying on the brown water, stirred by the paddling of ducks.”
Melancholic feeling
Melancholic Quotes — page 176 of 412
“We are all conceived in close prison; in our mothers wombs, we are close prisoners all; when we are born, we are born but to the liberty of the house; prisoners still, though within larger walls; and then all our life is but a going out to the place of execution, to death.”
“Writing does not resurrect. It buries.”
“So many old and lovely things are stored in the world's attic because we don't want them around us and we don't dare throw them out.”
“The quality of life is so different in France. There is the possibility of living a simple life. I would never contemplate raising my daughter in LA. I would never raise any child there.”
“We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.”
“Life and death have been lacking in my life.”
“Americans have discovered the fragility of life, that ominous fragility that the rest of the world either already experienced or is experiencing now with terrible intensity.”
“The perfect human being is uninteresting.”
“It is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this earth. The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself a face of pain; and some of our griefs (some only, not all, for it is the capacity for suffering which makes man August in the eyes of men) have their source in weaknesses which must be recognized with smiling com passion as the common inheritance of us all.”
“It occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility.”
“There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies.”
“Lights of ships moved in the fairway-a great stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.”
“I couldn't see much point in tying myself down to a middle-aged woman with four children, even though the woman was my wife and the children were my own.”
“The way the parts of me sometimes disagree, it's a wonder this body doesn't shatter.”
“I've been so mistreated by male authority in my life that I had a terrible time in my marriage trying to be a submissive wife. I wanted to rule the roost in everything. And it wasn't even really that I was rebellious; I was afraid of being hurt. And I think that a lot of people that choose these alternative lifestyles, I think it's because they've been hurt somewhere along the line very badly.”
“The movie that's had the most effect on me is Jaws. To this day when I'm in the ocean, I'm hearing that music.”
“Catcher in the Rye had a profound impact on me-the idea that we all have lots of dreams that are slowly being chipped away as we grow up.”
“It is easy for a somebody to be modest, but it is difficult to be modest when one is a nobody.”
“if I were to begin my life again, I should want it as it was. I would only open my eyes a little more.”