“I get an audience personally involved in a song - because I'm involved myself. It's not something I do deliberately: I can't help myself. If the song is a lament at the loss of love, I get an ache in my gut. I feel the loss myself and I cry out the loneliness, the hurt and the pain that I feel.”
Melancholic feeling
Melancholic Quotes — page 33 of 412
“The absurd man will not commit suicide; he wants to live, without relinquishing any of his certainty, without a future, without hope, without illusions … and without resignation either. He stares at death with passionate attention and this fascination liberates him. He experiences the “divine irresponsibility” of the condemned man.”
“That’s what existence means: draining one’s own self dry without the sense of thirst.”
“Most people don't grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging.”
“With my mother's death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.”
“I must also have a dark side if I am to be whole.”
“The blues aren’t pessimistic. We’re prisoners of hope but we tell the truth and the truth is dark.”
“So I asked him to play "Trav'lin' All Alone." That came closer than anything to the way I felt. And some part of it must have come across. The whole joint quieted down. If someone had dropped a pin, it would have sounded like a bomb. When I finished, everybody in the joint was crying in their beer, and I picked thirty-eight bucks up off the floor. . . . When I showed Mom the money for the rent and told her I had a regular job singing for eighteen dollars a week, she could hardly believe it.”
“The tragedy of life is what dies in the hearts and souls of people while they live.”
“Everything becomes so problematic because of basic faults: from a discontent with myself.”
“The problem is acceptance, which is something we're taught not to do. We're taught to improve uncomfortable situations, to change things, alleviate unpleasant feelings. But if you accept the reality that you have been given- that you are not in a productive creative period- you free yourself to begin filling up again.”
“After a certain point, money is meaningless. It ceases to be the goal. The game is what counts.”
“We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.”
“It's no good trying to keep up old friendships. It's painful for both sides. The fact is, one grows out of people, and the only thing is to face it.”
“All the time we spent in bed, counting miles before we said, fall in love and fall apart, things will end before they start.”
“Just as a snake sheds its skin, we must shed our past over and over again.”
“My very existence, my life in the world, seemed like a hallucination. A strong wind would make me think my body was about to be blown to the end of the earth, to some land I had never seen or heard of, where my mind and body would separate forever. “Hold tight,” I would tell myself, but there was nothing for me to hold on to.”
“Longing is the agony of the nearness of the distant.”
“My day passes between logic, whistling, going for walks, and being depressed. I wish to God that I were more intelligent and everything would finally become clear to me - or else that I needn't live much longer.”
“It takes a long time to become young.”