“Oh, would that my mind could let fall its dead ideas, as the tree does its withered leaves! And without too many regrets, if possible! Those from which the sap has withdrawn. But, good Lord, what beautiful colors!”
Melancholic feeling
Melancholic Quotes — page 192 of 412
“It is one of life's laws that as soon as one door closes another opens. But the tragedy is we look at the closed door and disregard the open one.”
“When the long, varnished buds of beech Point out beyond their reach, And tanned by summer suns Leaves of bright bryony turn bronze, And gossamer floats bright and wet From trees that are their own sunset, Spring, summer, autumn I come here, And what is there to fear? And yet I never lose the feeling That someone else behind is stealing Or else in front has disappeared; Though nothing I have seen or heard, Makes me still walk beneath these boughs With cautious step as in a haunted house.”
“I don't want to be smart, because being smart makes you depressed.”
“During the 1960s, I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don't think they've ever remembered.”
“I don't have incredible knowledge about films or of filmmaking history; I'm not that kind of person.”
“A lot of people don't know what I do. In the industry they take credit for work because to some degree it makes them feel worthy or greater. I am not a ghostwriter 'cause it is on the CD covers who wrote and did what but people don't care about anything they can't see. The work gets unnoticed and the credibility goes untouched.”
“Little by little, in telling Sam all these details, I got to see the bigger point of baseball, that it can give us back ourselves. We’re a crowd animal, a highly gregarious, communicative species, but the culture and the age and all the fear that fills our days have put almost everyone into little boxes, each of us all alone. But baseball, if we love it, gives us back our place in the crowd. It restores us.”
“I don't know where to start," one [writing student] will wail. Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O' Connor said that anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don't worry about doing it well yet, though. Just get it down.”
“Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.”
“Rats live on no evil star”
“I sit at my desk each night with no place to go, opening the wrinkled maps of Milwaukee and Buffalo, the whole U.S., its cemeteries, its arbitrary time zones, through routes like small veins, capitals like small stones.”
“God went out of me as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun became a latrine.”
“I think I've been writing black poems all along, wearing my white mask. I'm always the victim ... but no longer!”
“I rot on the wall, my own Dorian Gray.”
“My earlier poems were sadder than my poems are today, perhaps because I wrote them in confusion or when I was unhappy. But I am not a melancholy person, quite the contrary, no one enjoys laughing more than I do.”
“We all know the tragedy of the dustbowls, the cruel unforgivable erosions of the soil, the depletion of fish or game, and the shrinking of the noble forests. And we know that such catastrophes shrivel the spirit of the people... The wilderness is pushed back, man is everywhere. Solitude, so vital to the individual man, is almost nowhere.”
“Posterity will say as usual: "In the past things were better, the present is worse than the past.”
“The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders, its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it.”
“There is a cropping-time in the races of men, as in the fruits of the field; and sometimes, if the stock be good, there springs up for a time a succession of splendid men; and then comes a period of barrenness.”