“One plays at being immortal and after a few weeks one doesn't even know whether or not one can hang on till the next day.”
Melancholic feeling
Melancholic Quotes — page 194 of 412
“Fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren.”
“The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone!”
“I can only guess that it made the world he went back to...strangely without meaning. Though he lived in it, though he even enjoyed it, it remained utterly remote. I think it had lost sense for him. In his heart was the reflection of a lovely dream that he could never quite recall.”
“By the time a man notices that he is no longer young, his youth has long since left him.”
“The night Makes everything grotesque. Is it because Night is the nature of man's interior world?”
“It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.”
“Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost.”
“Many a good man I have seen go under.”
“When I was in high school if you were black and lived in Detroit, and you wanted to drive down to Florida to go on vacation, you had to plan to drive all the way through, because you couldn't stop in a hotel all the way through South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia. We can't even fathom such a thing now, can we?”
“The greatest of all fools is the proud fool--who is at the mercy of every fool he meets.”
“A skylark wounded in the wing, / A cherubim does cease to sing.”
“That make the meadows green; and, poured round all, Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste,-- Are but the solemn decorations all Of the great tomb of man.”
“For such, Being made beautiful overmuch, Consider beauty a sufficient end, Lose natural kindness and maybe The heart-revealing intimacy That chooses right, and never find a friend.”
“The past isn't over. It isn't even past.”
“All of us have failed to match our dream of perfection. I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. If I could write all my work again, I'm convinced I could do it better. This is the healthiest condition for an artist. That's why he keeps working, trying again: he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won't.”
“Little did I conceive of the greatness of the defeat (at Bull Run), the magnitude of the disaster which it had entailed upon the United States. So short-lived has been the American Union, that men who saw it rise may live to see it fall.”
“All natural goods perish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth and health and pleasure vanish.”
“A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians.”
“A well-off plastic surgeon can suffer just as much as an Irish lad who has been abused or whatever.”