“And thus ever by day and night, under the sun and under the stars, climbing the dusty hills and toiling along the weary plains, journeying by land and journeying by sea, coming and going so strangely, to meet and to act and react on one another, move all we restless travellers through the pilgrimage of life.”
Melancholic feeling
Melancholic Quotes — page 232 of 412
“As I said just now, the world has gone past me. I don't blame it; but I no longer understand it. Tradesmen are not the same as they used to be, apprentices are not the same, business is not the same, business commodities are not the same. Seven-eighths of my stock is old-fashioned. I am an old-fashioned man in an old-fashioned shop, in a street that is not the same as I remember it. I have fallen behind the time, and am too old to catch it again.”
“It is no worse, because I write of it. It would be no better, if I stopped my most unwilling hand. Nothing can undo it; nothing can make it otherwise than as it was.”
“I had seen the damp lying on the outside of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying there all night, and using the window for a pocket-handkerchief.”
“I have been, as the phrase is, liberally educated, and am fit for nothing.”
“Its tall chimneys throw up black smoke, impregnating everything with soot, and the miners' faces as they traveled the streets were also imbued with that ancient melancholy of smoke, unifying everything with its grayish monotones, a perfect coupling with the gray mountain days.”
“But if I could go back in time, I wouldn't do a single thing differently. What if all those things I did were the things that got me here?”
“I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild. I didn't embrace the word as my new name because it defined negative aspects of my circumstances or life, but because even in my darkest days—those very days in which I was naming myself—I saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn't have known before.”
“I had a bad knee injury when I was about seventeen. I wasn't able to climb for about six months. It was kind of like a transformative time for me, because it was really hard for me not to be able to climb. It forced me to appreciate things without just climbing.”
“Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife.”
“There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel better too, I guarantee, once you leave hold of the doctrinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking.”
“When I was young there was no respect for the young, and now that I am old there is no respect for the old”
“I think being able to age gracefully is a very important talent. It is too late for me.”
“You know when you're young and you see a play in high school, and the guys all have gray in their hair and they're trying to be old men and they have no idea what that's like? It's just that stupid the other way around.”
“If you did not do so for the sake of riches,You must have done so for the sake of novelty.”
“We're all vanishing organisms and disappearing creatures in space and time - that death sentence in space in time that Kafka talked about with such profundity.”
“And perhaps beyond those shrouded swells another man did walk with another child on the dead gray sands. Slept but a sea apart on another beach among the bitter ashes of the world or stood in their rags lost to the same indifferent sun.”
“One of the things you realize about gettin older is that not everybody is goin to get older with you.”
“This incompleteness is all we have.”
“What's a joy to the one is a nightmare to the other.”