“Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-pern, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison.”
Melancholic feeling
Melancholic Quotes — page 210 of 412
“She had wandered, without rule or guidance, into a moral wilderness... Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods... The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers—stern and wild ones—and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.”
“Most people are so constituted that they can only be virtuous in a certain routine; an irregular course of life demoralizes them.”
“No summer ever came back, and no two summers ever were alike. Times change, and people change; and if our hearts do not change as readily, so much the worse for us.”
“Such has often been my apathy, when objects long sought, and earnestly desired, were placed within my reach.”
“It is very singular how the fact of a man's death often seems to give people a truer idea of his character, whether for good or evil, than they have ever possessed while he was living and acting among them.”
“Shall we never never get rid of this Past? ... It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body.”
“The world, that grey-bearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without being venerable.”
“Of dead kingdoms I recall the soul, sitting amid their ruins”
“Just a little rain falling all around The grass lifts its head to the heavenly sound Just a little rain, just a little rain What have they done to the rain? Just a little boy standing in the rain The gentle rain that falls for years And the grass is gone and the boy disappears And the rain keeps falling like helpless tears And what have they done to the rain? Just a little breeze out of the sky The leaves nod their heads as the breeze blows by Just a little breeze with some smoke in its eye And what have they done to the rain?”
“She looked into the distance, and the old terror flamed up for an instant, then sank again. Edna heard her father's voice and her sister Margaret's. She heard the barking of an old dog that was chained to the sycamore tree. The spurs of the cavalry officer clanged as he walked across the porch. There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air. (last lines)”
“I goddamn near lost my nose. And I like it. I like breathing through it.”
“Perfection. Excellence. What a passionate lover. But once having tasted the lips of excellence, once having given oneself to its perfection, how dreary and burdensome and filled with anomie are the remainder of one's waking hours trapped in the shackled lock-step of the merely ordinary, the barely acceptable, the just okay and not a stroke better.”
“The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had.”
“Gradually my whole concept of time changed until I thought of a month as having twenty-five days of humanness and five others when I might just as well have been an animal in a steel trap.”
“Real feminism is spinsterhood.”
“Well I could have been just a writer. I had been a hair dresser. I could have stuck with that.”
“The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do.”
“Normally, in anything I do, I'm fairly miserable. I do it, and I get grumpy because there is a huge, vast gulf, this aching disparity, between the platonic ideal of the project that was living in my head, and the small, sad, wizened, shaking, squeaking thing that I actually produce.”
“Nothing I did where the only reason for doing it was the money was ever worth it, except as bitter experience.”