“As to London we must console ourselves with the thought that if life outside is less poetic than it was in the days of old, inwardly its poetry is much deeper.”
Melancholic feeling
Melancholic Quotes — page 217 of 412
“At a certain age, you have to live near good medical care — if, that is, you're going to continue. You always have the option of not continuing, which, I fear, is sometimes nobler.”
“Altruism is a brief phase through which some adolescents must pass. It is rather like acne. Happily, as with acne, only a few are permanently scarred.”
“...I remain restless and dissatisfied; what I knot with my right hand, I undo with my left, what my left hand creates, my right fist shatters”
“And that's why people read comics, to get away from the way life works, which is quite cruel and unheroic and ends in death.”
“There's something about black. You feel hidden away in it.”
“When you get so that you can't see, you come to it gradually. And if you didn't come by it gradually, I guess you'd just kill yourself when you couldn't see.”
“I'm folding up my little dreams Within my heart tonight, And praying I may soon forget The torture of their sight.”
“The humiliation I go through/when I think of my past/can only be described as grace./We are created by being destroyed.”
“That's a very high goal to have, study eight hours a day to be a concert pianist.”
“If you go back a century in Europe, all over the place people were speaking different languages. There were dozens of languages in France and Italy, and they're all called French [and Italian], but they were not mutually comprehensible. They were different languages. And they have mostly disappeared in the last century or so. Some are being preserved, like Welsh, some are being revived, like Basque or Catelan to some extent. There are plenty of people in Europe who can't talk to their grandmother because they talk a different language.”
“I feel like I've lived quite a sheltered life, like my mom and dad were quite protective of me.”
“My friends are gone and my hair is grey. I ache in places I used to play. And I’m crazy for love but I’m not coming on. I’m just paying my rent every day in the tower of song.”
“So the great affair is over but whoever would have guessed, It would leave us all so vacant and so deeply unimpressed, It's like our visit to the moon or to that other star, I guess you go for nothing if you really want to go that far.”
“And I had not much of a voice. I didn't play that great guitar either.”
“O Time with your teethy years! You swallow up all things little by little in a slow-motion, wrinkling process of dying.”
“The fame of the rich man dies with him; the fame of the treasure, and not of the man who possessed it, remains.”
“The romantic temper, so often and so grievously misinterpreted and not more by others than by its own, is an insecure, unsatisfied, and impatient temper which sees no fit abode here for its ideals and chooses therefore to behold them under insensible figures. As a result of this choice it comes to disregard certain limitations. Its figures are blown to wild adventures, lacking the gravity of solid bodies, and the mind that has conceived them ends by disowning them.”
“Drugs age you after mental excitement. Lethargy then. Why? Reaction. A lifetime in a night. Gradually changes your character.”
“But the participants [in war] never forgot the details of their experience, and like the Wandering Jew, they were condemned to remain their own history books, each containing a story they could not pass on to others and from which no one would learn anything of value.”