“The whiskey warmed his tongue and the back of his throat, but it did not change his ideas any, and suddenly, looking at himself in the mirror behind the bar, he knew that drinking was never going to do any good to him now. Whatever he had now he had, and it was from now on, and if he drank himself unconscious when he woke up it would be there.”
Melancholic feeling
Melancholic Quotes — page 183 of 412
“Some other places were not so good but maybe we were not so good when we were in them.”
“He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and the lions on the beach. They played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them as he loved the boy. He never dreamed about the boy. He simply woke, looked out the open door at the moon and unrolled his trousers and put them on.”
“If you have a success, you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work.”
“I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking and not knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so exciting that you must resume again unknowing and not caring in the night, sure that this was all and all and all and not caring.”
“I had so many beliefs against being a singer or what it takes. There was a lot of pain associated with that. The rejection of it all. I lived in a rejection state of mind. Not because of my voice; the mike never rejected me. It was harboring all those bad memories of being broke. It teaches you your worth. Nothing good comes from that.”
“O virtue, I have followed you through life, and find you at last but a shade.”
“where the dead walked and the living were made of cardboard.”
“Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man.”
“Certain songs just feel a way that's hard to put into words and it's not happy and it's also not really sad but I couldn't say what it is”
“I like to think how easily Nature will absorb London as she absorbed the mastodon, setting her spiders to spin the winding-sheet and her worms to fill in the grave, and her grass to cover it pitifully up, adding flowers - as an unknown hand added them to the grave of Nero.”
“Indolence and melancholy: Each generates the other. If one can speak of such feeble passions as generating anything.”
“Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites.”
“In the dissolution of sentimental partnerships it is seldom that both associates are able to withdraw their funds at the same time.”
“...though she had not had the strength to shake off the spell that bound her to him she had lost all spontaneity of feeling, and seemed to herself to be passively awaiting a fate she could not avert.”
“Growing up, all I did was work and vacation, but I loved it, no one pushed me into anything. The thing was I developed no special skills. I don't have any resentment because I am a performer and I've always felt that, but it did take its toll socially.”
“I live in my deepest hell and from there I cannot fall any further.”
“Seldom, or perhaps never, does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly and without crises; there is no coming to consciousness without pain.”
“I have written some poetry that I don't understand myself.”
“So those who wished for some central cosmic purpose for us, or at least our world, or at least our solar system, or at least our galaxy, have been disappointed, progressively disappointed. The universe is not responsive to our ambitious expectations.”