“When you are in your twenties, even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become. Later.. later there is more uncertainty, more overlapping, more backtracking, more false memories. Back then, you can remember your short life in its entirety. Later, the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches.”
Melancholic feeling
Melancholic Quotes — page 177 of 412
“The last act in the biography of the hero is that of the death or departure.”
“As this world was not intended to be a state of any great satisfaction or high enjoyment, so neither was it intended to be a mere scene of unhappiness and sorrow.”
“I feel like a cliche.”
“Writing is like the life of a glacier; one eternal grind.”
“The marks humans leave are too often scars.”
“Entropy increases. Things fall apart.”
“But the present life should never be hated, except insofar as it subjects us to sin, although even that hatred should not properly be applied to life itself.”
“The past could be jettisoned . . . but seeds got carried.”
“The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.”
“Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men. Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth, now the living timber bursts with the new buds and spring comes round again. And so with men: as one generation comes to life, another dies away.”
“The 'tide in the affairs of men' does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: 'Too late...'”
“Too unconcerned to love and too passionless to hate, too detached to be selfish and too lifeless to be unselfish, too indifferent to experience joy and too cold to express sorrow, they are neither dead nor alive; they merely exist.”
“Poverty hath slain a thousand, but riches have slain ten thousand. They are very uncertain, they promise that which they cannot perform, neither can they afford a contented mind.”
“But I am a blasted tree; the bolt has entered my soul; and I felt then that I should survive to exhibit what I shall soon cease to be - a miserable spectacle of wrecked humanity, pitiable to others and intolerable to myself.”
“Summer grasses — all that remains of great soldiers' imperial dreams.”
“To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision. Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity. It becomes easier to die and avoid conflict than to maintain a constant battle with the superior forces of maturity.”
“Achievement brings its own anticlimax.”
“Wrinkled, wrinkled little star... hope they never see the scars.”
“I want to feel my life while I'm in it.”