“I rose too high, loved too hard, dared too much. I tried to grasp a star, overreached, and fell.”
Melancholic feeling
Melancholic Quotes — page 216 of 412
“Men have scars, women mysteries.”
“No one will be alive by the last book. In fact, they all die in the fifth. The sixth book will be just a thousand-page description of snow blowing across the graves.”
“You wear your honor like a suit of armor... You think it keeps you safe, but all it does is weigh you down and make it hard for you to move.”
“I have an instinctual distrust of conventional happy endings.”
“Nothing burns like the cold. But only for a while. Then it gets inside you and starts to fill you up, and after a while you don't have the strength to fight it.”
“There’s an old writing rule that says ‘Don’t have two character names start with the same letter’, but I knew at the beginning that I was going to have more than 26 characters, so I was in trouble there. Ultimately it comes down to what sounds right. And I struggle with that, finding the right name for a character. If I can’t find the right name I don’t know who the character is and I can’t proceed.”
“Shattered legs may heal in time, but some betrayals fester and poison the soul.”
“What was it Catelyn Stark had called them, that night at Bitterbridge? The knights of summer. And now it was autumn and they were falling like leaves.”
“The lessons of experience are always learned too late.”
“Conscience ... seldom comes to a man's aid while he is in the zenith of health and revelling in pomp and luxury upon illgotten spoils. It is generally the last act of his life, and it comes too late to be of much service to others here, or to himself hereafter.”
“Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for, I have grown not only gray, but almost blind in the service of my country. - March 15, 1783”
“It is to be lamented that great characters are seldom without a blot.”
“Ah, to think how thin the veil that lies Between the pain of hell and Paradise.”
“I can now see to the bottom of my own depths, there is nothing stopping my gaze, no obstacle is in the way. And there is nothing there.”
“I asked Mother how she endured so many years of goodbyes. She quoted a mountain-man who said, 'Make the least of all that goes and the most of all that comes.'”
“Being a success at work is not worth it if it means being a failure at home.”
“Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this, that by its creed Joy becomes something gigantic, and Sadness something special and small.”
“Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when Joy is the fundamental thing in him, and Grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive state of mind; Praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; Joy is the uproarious labor by which all things live? Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this, that by its creed Joy becomes something gigantic, and Sadness something special and small.”
“Yet for my part, deeply as I am moved by the religious architecture of the Middle Ages, I cannot honestly say that I ever felt the slightest emotion in any modern Gothic church.”