“And if there are no cars or planes, and if no one’s Uncle John is out in the wood lot west of town banging away at a quail or pheasant; if the only sound is the slow beat of your own heart, you can hear another sound, and that is the sound of life winding down to its cyclic close, waiting for the first winter snow to perform last rites.”
Melancholic feeling
Melancholic Quotes — page 205 of 412
“I remember eating in school in the years after the Second World War. Most of my friends had miserable portions of Spam with an inedible, glutinous pudding served in containers we called 'coffins.' As a vegetarian, I had a lump of loathsome cheese and some bread.”
“Time slips through our hands like grains of sand, never to return again.”
“No matter how expected, death is always the ultimate surprise.”
“I wouldn't go out of my way to experience the indignity of middle-age just because it might be good meat for a story.”
“If you saw her in these moments, you might think she was collecting her thoughts in order to go forward. But I see it another way: Her mind is being overwhelmed by two processes that must simultaneously proceed at full steam. One is to deal with and live in the present world. The other is to re-experience and mourn something that happened long ago. It is as though her lightness pulls her toward heaven, but the extra gravity around her keeps her earthbound.”
“That transformation is to lose everything is an understatement so vast as to be without meaning. One has to lose everything, and one has to lose the one who has lost everything.”
“Two babies were born on the same day at the same hospital. They lay there and looked at each other. Their families came and took them away. Eighty years later, by a bizarre coincidence, they lay in the same hospital, on their deathbeds, next to each other. One of them looked at the other and said, 'So, what did you think?”
“I’m just confusing the thrill of being young with the notion that the era in which I was young was in any way especially creative or remarkable.”
“For decades, we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children's future for the temporary convenience of the present. To continue this long trend is to guarantee tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals. You and I, as individuals, can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but for only a limited period of time. Why, then, should we think that collectively, as a nation, we are not bound by that same limitation?”
“Well, the first year I lost my voice I didn't mind so much because I was going to have a baby and I was distracted with him anyway, I didn't even think about it that much, well, OK, this is what's happening.”
“I look back on my years as a Wall Street lawyer as time spent in a foreign country.”
“He who is alone is happy. Do good to all, like everyone, but do not love anyone. It is a bondage, and bondage brings only misery. Live alone in your mind - that is happiness. To have nobody to care for and never minding who cares for one is the way to be free.”
“I have two lovely sons and some good memories, but I've had a rather tumultuous personal life. It hasn't been dull; I've been the Hiroshima of love.”
“My life has always been chaotic. From the time I got dressed in the back of a deflated, flat-tired, fish-smelling station wagon for Rocky. It's always been do it yourself, kind of like paper-clip it together.”
“Colonialism has completed the destruction of the American Indian in the United States - the cultural destruction.”
“I do not know who lives here in my chest, or why the smile comes. I am not myself, more the bare green knob of a rose that lost every leaf and petal to the morning wind.”
“I was once like you, enlightened and "rational", I too scoffed at lovers, Now I am drunk, crazed, thin with misery. No one is safe! Watch out.”
“It is a sobering thought that animals could do without man, yet man would find it almost impossible to do without animals.”
“I can't say I've ever finished a film and been particularly thrilled with myself or patted myself on the back. And maybe that's what keeps me going, and that's a good thing. It speaks volumes about how I perceive myself.”