Melancholy Quotes

“Those are the moments I’m proud of. The times I saw through them. The times I made them work to break me, even though I knew they would. The times I questioned the lies being fed to me, though everyone around me believed. I learned early that if everyone around you has their head bowed, their eyes shut tight—keep your eyes open and look around.

I’m reflexively suspicious of anyone who stands on a soapbox. Tell me you have the answers and I’ll know you’re trying to sell me something. I’m as wary of certainty as I am of good vibes and positive thinking. They’re delusions that allow you to ignore reality and lay the blame at the feet of those suffering. They just didn’t follow the rules, or think positively enough. They brought it on themselves.

I don’t have the answers. Maybe depression’s the natural reaction to a world full of cruelty and pain. But the thing I know about depression is if you want to survive it, you have to train yourself to hold on; when you can see no reason to keep going, you cannot imagine a future worth seeing, you keep moving anyway. That’s not delusion. That’s hope. It’s a muscle you exercise so it’s strong when you need it. You feed it with books and art and dogs who rest their head on your leg, and human connection with people who are genuinely interested and excited; you feed it with growing a tomato and baking sourdough and making a baby laugh and standing at the edge of oceans and feeling a horse’s whiskers on your palm and bear hugs and late-night talks over whiskey and a warm happy sigh on your neck and the unexpected perfect song on the radio, and mushroom trips with a friend who giggles at the way the trees aren’t acting right, and jumping in creeks, and lying in the grass under the stars, and driving with the windows down on a swirly two-lane road. You stock up like a fucking prepper buying tubs of chipped beef and powdered milk and ammo. You stock up so some part of you knows and remembers, even in the dark, all that’s worth saving in this world.

It’s comforting to know what happens next. But if there’s one thing I know, it’s that no one fucking knows. And it’s terrifying.

I don’t dream of a home and a family, a career and financial stability. I dream of living. And my inner voice, defective though it may be, still tells me happiness and peace, belonging and love, all lie just around the next corner, the next city, the next country. Just keep moving and hope the next place will be better. It has to be. Just around the next bend, everything is beautiful. And it breaks my heart.”
― Lauren Hough, Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing

“I wish I were like the fall...I wish I were like the fall
I wish I were like the fall, silent, with no desires at all
My wishes' leaves would one by one turn sallow-gold
My eyes' sun would grow cold
The heaven of my breast would fill with pain
And suddenly a storm of grief would seize my heart
Like rain my tears would start
And stain my dress
Oh...how lovely then, if I were like the fall
Feral and bitter, with colours seeping into one another, so beautiful

- In Love with Sadness”
― Forugh Farrokhzad, The Mirror of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women

“This interplay between hope and reality was also a part of the mourning.”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“Benny stands there in front of the refrigerator, letting the cool air fall on her toes, and thinks of the last cake her mother ever baked. She knows it’s sitting in the freezer but she can’t bear to look in there right now. Instead, she leans her forehead against the upper door of the fridge. This is your heritage, her mother used to say when they were making black cake, and Benny thought she knew what her
mother meant. But she sees now that she didn’t know the half of it.”
― Charmaine Wilkerson, Black Cake

“One colour. One word. So many shades. The color of african skin, of shadow on snow, of a jay's throat, the color of saxophones at dusk, of orbiting police lights smeared across tenement windows, of a flame's intestines, of the faint tracery of veins visible beneath the ghost-flesh of her forearm's underside, of loneliness, of melancholy. The blues.”
― Alan Moore

“Would anyone be waiting for us, on those vast fields?”
― Nguyễn Ngọc Tư, Endless Field

“Nothing can match the elation of the chronically melancholy when joy arrives. But before being allowed to arrive, it must lay siege to the weary heart. Let me in, it mews, it bellows. The heart must be forced.”
― Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover

“Time moves in one direction and love stands still.”
― Greg Lockard, Liebestrasse

“He kissed me on the mouth. The man tasted like melancholy and mint. He tasted familiar.”
― Diriye Osman, The Butterfly Jungle

“I'm dull and sad! indeed, indeed
I know I have no reason!
Perhaps I am not well in health,
And 'tis a gloomy season.

- The Three Graves”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poems

“Be witness to me, O thou blessed moon […]
O sovereign mistress of true melancholy,
The poisonous damp of night dispunge upon me,
That life, a very rebel to my will,
May hang no longer on me. Throw my heart
Against the flint and hardness of my fault,
Which being dried with grief will break to powder,
And finish all foul thoughts.”
― William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra

“Soon, I'll be alone in a quiet room where, for the rest of my life, I can float farther and farther out into the world; while my student, charging off the end of every map, falls deeper and deeper into the well of himself. 'Never be afraid to enter an argument you can't immediately see yourself out of.' Can anyone tell me what a tragedy is?”
― Annabel Lyon, The Golden Mean

“He came back from France when Tom and Daisy were still on their wedding trip, and made a miserable but irresistible journey to Louisville on the last of his army pay. He stayed there a week, walking the streets where their footsteps had clicked together through the November night and revisiting the out-of-the-way places to which they had driven in her white car. Just as Daisy's house had always seemed to him more mysterious and gay than other houses so his idea of the city itself, even though she was gone from it, was pervaded with a melancholy beauty.

He left feeling that if he had searched harder he might have found her—that he was leaving her behind. The day-coach—he was penniless now—was hot. He went out to the open vestibule and sat down on a folding-chair, and the station slid away and the backs of unfamiliar buildings moved by. Then out into the spring fields, where a yellow trolley raced them for a minute with people in it who might once have seen the pale magic of her face along the casual street.

The track curved and now it was going away from the sun which, as it sank lower, seemed to spread itself in benediction over the vanishing city where she had drawn her breath. He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“No matter what I'm doing, I can't help thinking about those who are gone. I catch myself laughing and remember that it's a disgrace to be so cheerful.”
― Anne Frank, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl

“My dear Victor, do not speak thus. Heavy misfortunes have befallen us; but let us only cling closer to what remains, and transfer our love for those whom we have lost to those who yet live. Our circle will be small, but bound close by the ties of affection and mutual misfortune. And when time shall
have softened your despair, new and dear objects of care will be born to replace those of whom we have been so cruelly deprived.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“You wear poetry in your eyes.”
― Laraib Zakir, Chaos in Utter Silence

“Brand new short story writer from Ireland who will become the next “breakthrough” writer. He has all the hallmarks of a wizard storyteller and this book is up there with the very best newcomers”
― Darren Moore, Five Incredible Short Stories

“Sometimes my love is melancholy
and I hold her head in my hands.
Sometimes I recall our hair grows after death.
Then, I must grab handfuls
of her hair, and, I tell you, there
are apples, walnuts, ships sailing, ships docking, and men
taking off their boots, their hearts breaking,
not knowing
which they love more, the water, or
their women's hair, sprouting from the head, rushing toward the feet.”
― Li-Young Lee, Rose

“One colour. One word. So many shades. The color of african skin, of shadow on snow, of a jay's throat, the color of saxophones at dusk, of orbiting police lights smeared across tenement windows, of a flame's intestines, of the faint tracery of veins visible beneath the ghost-flesh of her forearm's underside, of loneliness, of melancholy. The blues.”
― Alan Moore, Swamp Thing #56

“All that hurts about pain is that it makes a person alone in the face of questions, but some people come out, whether it is illusory or not to me, but the experience of pain is what makes sense to me, even if you don't get what it is.”
― السعيد عبدالغني

“Ni siquiera le robé el espacio a la tierra... me enterraron en tu misma sepultura y cupe muy bien en el hueco de tus brazos. Aquí en este rincón donde me tienes ahora.”
― Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo

“When one is very young and very happy, one courts melancholy thoughts for the sake of the contrast they afford to one's own inner life; in later days such thoughts are less coy, need no courting, but run to meet us, embrace, and cling about us, even when we could well dispense with the pleasure of their society. But in youth, when the blood is rioting through the veins, life seems so strong within us as to be almost able to challenge the old scythesman to single combat, and worst him.”
― Rhoda Broughton, Cometh Up As a Flower

“Ni rien ni personne ne m'intéressait, et je ne pensais ni à l'avenir ni au présent. Je vivais du passé, comme les pauvres vivent de pain rassis.”
― Tatiana Țîbuleac, El verano en que mi madre tuvo los ojos verdes

“Melancholy is the enticing madness that evokes solitude and ecstasy as it is the song of a secluded sadness, a laughter veiling the falling rain....”
― Jayita Bhattacharjee

“Artists often feel sad without knowing why.”
― Clifford Thurlow, Sex Surrealism Dali & Me

“Within depression, if my existence is on the verge of collapsing, its lack of meaning is not tragic--it appears obvious to me, glaring and inescapable.”
― Julia Kristeva, Black Sun

“Il se sent malheureux de constater, impuissant, que tout glisse et rampe sournoisement, il ne sait pas d'où cela vient, cette impression que s'achèvent des choses qu'il n'a même pas vues commencer.”
― Pierre Lemaitre, Le serpent majuscule

“When life is a choice between fighting or fleeing- every moment life or death-everything becomes a weapon. It doesn’t matter who holds them. Weapons harm.”
― Shelby Mahurin, Blood & Honey

“Still, the melancholy of this dying culture was all around us. Great as the desire to westernize and modernize may have been, the more desperate wish was probably to be rid of all the bitter memories of the fallen empire, rather as a spurned lover throws away his lost beloved's clothes, possessions, and photographs. But as nothing, western or local, came to fill the void, the great drive to westernize amounted mostly to the erasure of the past; the effect on culture was reductive and stunting, leading families like mine, otherwise glad of republican progress, to furnish their houses like museums.”
― Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City

“only melancholy has its dedicated following: everyone loves a good sob story every now and then.”
― Najaha Nauf, Slow Dancing with The Stars