Melancholy Quotes

“I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.”
― Italo Calvino

“I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.”
― Victor Hugo

“I go to sleep alone, and wake up alone. I take walks. I work until I'm tired. I watch the wind play with the trash that's been under the snow all winter. Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love intensified by abscence?”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself was weeping, and I felt my face and it was dry.

Then I looked at the window and thought: Why, yes, it's just the rain, the rain, always the rain, and turned over, sadder still, and fumbled about for my dripping sleep and tried to slip it back on.”
― Ray Bradbury, Green Shadows, White Whale

“Depression is melancholy minus its charms.”
― Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor

“I am my heart’s undertaker. Daily I go and retrieve its tattered remains, place them delicately into its little coffin, and bury it in the depths of my memory, only to have to do it all again tomorrow.”
― Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls

“A melancholy-looking man, he had the appearance of one who has searched for the leak in life's gas-pipe with a lighted candle.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, The Man Upstairs and Other Stories

“A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.”
― Emil Cioran, All Gall is Divided: Aphorisms

“I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity but to mature and transfigure us.”
― Hermann Hesse, Peter Camenzind

“Melancholia is, I believe, a musical problem: a dissonance, a change in rhythm. While on the outside everything happens with the vertiginous rhythm of a cataract, on the inside is the exhausted adagio of drops of water falling from time to tired time. For this reason the outside, seen from the melancholic inside, appears absurd and unreal, and constitutes ‘the farce we all must play’. But for an instant – because of a wild music, or a drug, or the sexual act carried to its climax – the very slow rhythm of the melancholic soul does not only rise to that of the outside world: it overtakes it with an ineffably blissful exorbitance, and the soul then thrills animated by delirious new energies”
― Alejandra Pizarnik

“I laugh, and my lipstick leaves a red stain like a bloody crescent moon on the top of the beer can.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“For some nights I slept profoundly; but still every morning I felt the same lassitude, and a languor weighed upon me all day. I felt myself a changed girl. A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was slowly sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome possession of me. If it was sad, the tone of mind which this induced was also sweet. Whatever it might be, my soul acquiesced in it.”
― Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla

“Melancholy suicide. —This is connected with a general state of extreme depression and exaggerated sadness, causing the patient no longer to realize sanely the bonds which connect him with people and things about him. Pleasures no longer attract;”
― Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology

“Lie still, lie still, my breaking heart;
My silent heart, lie still and break:
Life, and the world, and mine own self, are changed
For a dream's sake.”
― Christina Rossetti

“He had done nothing on Christmas day, just wandered around outside in the frozen woods. Hard ground, chill winds and bare branches that looked like they'd been dipped in sugar. None of it seemed real, like walking around in a desolate dream, but one he didn't want to wake up from.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Elephant Tree

“His mouth went dry and for a split second he had a metallic taste on the sides of his tongue. He stood, turned, and gulped. A vision had appeared from somewhere. Was she real? She was tall, with long, glossy light-gold hair surrounding a perfectly shaped face. The front of her silk white robe was open down to a delightful cleavage where a long silver cross hung. As she walked slowly past Alec to sit at the desk, the robe parted for a fleeting glimpse of her leg. A scent of lily of the valley meandered over him. A hand with long graceful fingers indicated for him to sit again in his chair. She was real!
She was, without doubt, the most beautiful woman Alec had ever seen.”
― Hugo Woolley, The Wasp Trap

“It’s how I fill the time when nothing’s happening. Thinking too much, flirting with melancholy.”
― Tim Winton, Breath

“And, at such a time, for a few of us there will always be a tugging at the heart—knowing a precious moment had gone and we not there. We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours for ever—the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on belfry floor, a remembered voice, a loved face. They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass. ”
― J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country

“That's most interesting. But I was no more a mind-reader then than today. I
was weeping for an altogether different reason. When I watched you dancing that day, I saw something else. I saw a new world coming rapidly. More
scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But a
harsh, cruel world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not
remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go. That is what I saw. It wasn't really you, what you were doing, I know that. But I saw you and it broke my heart. And I've never forgotten.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“The soulless have no need of melancholia”
― Vladimir Odoyevsky, The Salamander and Other Gothic Tales

“Autumn is as joyful and sweet as an untimely end.”
― Remy de Gourmont

“Often it feels like I am breathing today only because a few years back I had no idea which nerve to cut...”
― Sanhita Baruah

“i have laughed
more than daffodils
and cried more than June.”
― Sanober Khan

“The lost glove is happy.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“Unfortunately I am a completely impractical person, caught up in endless trains of thought. All of us are fantasists, ill-equipped for life, the children as much as myself. It seems to me sometimes that we never get used to being on this earth and life is just one great, ongoing, incomprehensible blunder.”
― W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn