Melancholia Quotes

“I felt as though the vessel if my suffering had become empty, as if nothing could interest me now. I had lost even the ability to suffer.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“The depressed person is a radical, sullen atheist.”
― Julia Kristeva

“Anyway, those things would not have lasted long.
The experience of the years shows it to me.
But Destiny arrived in some haste and stopped them.
The beautiful life was brief.
But how potent were the perfumes,
On how splendid a bed we lay,
To what sensual delight we gave our bodies.

An echo of the days of pleasure,
An echo of the days drew near me,
A little of the fire of the youth of both of us,
Again I took in my hands a letter,
And I read and reread till the light was gone.

And melancholy, I came out on the balcony
Came out to change my thoughts at least by looking at
A little of the city that I loved,
A little movement on the street and in the shops.

Translated by Rae Dalven”
― C.P. Cavafy

“Can the beautiful be sad? Is beauty inseparable from the ephemeral and hence from mourning? Or else is the beautiful object the one that tirelessly returns following destructions and wars in order to bear witness that there is survival after death, that immortality is possible?”
― Julia Kristeva, Black Sun

“Hermann Boerhaave still defined melancholia as merely "a long persistent delirium without fever, during which the sufferer is obsessed by only one thought.”
― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“Oh quickly disappearing photograph
in my more slowly disappearing hand.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Collected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“We can postulate that there must be diseases founded on a conflict between ego and super-ego. Analysis gives us the right to infer that melancholia is the model of this group, and then we should put in a claim for the name of "narcissistic psychoneuroses" for these disorders.”
― Sigmund Freud, General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology

“Then I tell you that sadness, in a way, is just another form of beauty. It can be a bit more melancholic, dramatic, heart-breaking and so, so quiet. The most emotional of things, finding its reflection in the world in decay, are those things we love the most from time to time.”
― Kate Luysterborg, Blame It on My Youth: Stories by students on the art of being young

“No one wants this lonely space to murmur anymore
but it echoes & it remains a noise I learn to love immensely”
― D C de Oliveira, [im]permanent: Poetic Abstraction

“If you felt empty and sad after doing something, you probably did a great thing.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Song of a Nature Lover

“I didn’t say anything. I could hardly just say I was sick. I couldn’t explain it, the feeling I had that everything was falling away and trying to grab hold of any of it only made me lose it faster. The feeling that everything I did just made me sink lower, and I couldn’t move anymore.”
― Lily Seabrooke, Different Worlds

“The Japanese psychiatrist Kimura Bin, director of the Psychiatric Hos- pital of Kyoto and translator of Binswanger, sought to deepen Heidegger’s anal- ysis of temporality in Being and Time with reference to a classification of the fundamental types of mental illness. To this end he made use of the Latin for- mula post festum (literally, “after the celebration”), which indicates an irreparable past, an arrival at things that are already done. Post festum is symmetrically dis- tinguished from ante festum (“before the celebration”) and intra festum (“during the celebration”).
Post festum temporality is that of the melancholic, who always experiences his own “I” in the form of an “I was,” of an irrecoverably accomplished past with respect to which one can only be in debt. This experience of time corresponds in Heidegger to Dasein’s Being-thrown, its finding itself always already abandoned to a factual situation beyond which it can never venture. There is thus a kind of constitutive “melancholy” of human Dasein, which is always late with respect to itself, having always already missed its “celebration.”
Ante festum temporality corresponds to the experience of the schizophrenic, in which the direction of the melancholic’s orientation toward the past is in- verted. For the schizophrenic, the “I” is never a certain possession; it is always something to be attained, and the schizophrenic therefore always lives time in the form of anticipation. “The ‘I’ of the schizophrenic,” Kimura Bin writes, “is not the ‘I’ of the ‘already been’; it is not tied to a duty. In other words, it is not the post festum ‘I’ of the melancholic, which can only be spoken of in terms of a past and a debt. . . . Instead, the essential point here is the problem of one’s own possibility of being oneself, the problem of the certainty of becoming oneself and, therefore, the risk of possibly being alienated from oneself” (Kimura Bin 1992: 79). In Being and Time, the schizophrenic’s temporality corresponds to the primacy of the future in the form of projection and anticipation. Precisely because its experience of time originally temporalizes itself on the basis of the future, Dasein can be defined by Heidegger as “the being for whom, in its very Being, Being is always at issue” and also as “in its Being always already anticipat- ing itself.” But precisely for this reason, Dasein is constitutively schizophrenic; it always risks missing itself and not being present at its own “celebration.”
― Giorgio Agamben, The Omnibus Homo Sacer

“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

“I was asleep almost before I could close the flap on the tent.
Sleeping all day. This must be one of the ways people hide from pain.”
― Sarah Henstra, We Contain Multitudes

“It is not the absence of melancholy
Though the overcoming process during its complete presence
That allows me to fulfil my heart with greater happiness.”
― Francoise Helene, The Art of Wisdom: Poems for Soul Growth

“Gdy rozstajemy się z osobami, które bardzo polubiliśmy, lgnie do nich jakaś sekretna melancholia.”
― Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt, La Nuit de feu

“Och tydligen krävdes bara fyra ord för att börja berätta om mammor som dog, pappor som gick sönder och om känslan av att stå ensam och blicka ut på en framtid som borde vara ljus, men som i stället bestod av falnande kol och aska.”
― Callum Bloodworth, Berätta tre saker

“I am not alone. Existing in this melancholic world causes numerous individuals to feel remorseful and even harbor resentment. Contemplating the world fills me with melancholy. I sense a profound disconnection from the world. Feeling completely drained by my internal and external despair and indifference. I find myself filled with regret and eagerly await the conclusion. I believe my overwhelming anxiety has transformed into anhedonia and depression. Feelings of emptiness and not fitting in are common to all people. Feeling like an outsider hinders connection with others. Once quite the extrovert. I have always experienced a deep sense of disconnection, but at this stage of my life, numerous things have gone awry, making it almost unbearable.”
― Jonathan Harnisch

“Schau uns an, wir sind jung. Wir haben so viele Möglichkeiten, aber keine fühlt sich richtig an. Alles ist kaputt und zerfahren und kompliziert. Was ist das für eine scheiß Welt?”
― Mareike Fallwickl, Und alle so still

“El pequeño, de apenas once anos, que permanecía en su casa, quería entonces aprender a fumar, salir a fiestas de noche, tener amigas. En realidad deseaba robarle a la muerte algunos retazos de todo lo que no iba a vivir.”
― Luis Cañón M., Peregrinos del sida (Colección Colombia Hoy)

“Ain't this been a hell of a time?”
― Larry McMurtry , Leaving Cheyenne

“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

“তখন বহুদূর পাতা-ঝরা অরণ্যে দেখতে পাই
তোমার রহস্যময় হাসি—
তুমি জানো, সন্ধেবেলার আকাশে খেলা করে সাদা পায়রা
তারাও অন্ধকারে মুছে যায়, যেমন চোখের জ্যোতি— এবং পৃথিবীতে
এত দুঃখ
মানুষের দুঃখই শুধু তার জন্মকালও ছাড়িয়ে যায়।”
― Sunil Gangopadhyay, কবিতা সমগ্র ১

“Depression kills faster than cyanide.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Stamerenophobia

“I saw my husband become so used to my presence that he no longer found it miraculous.”
― Maud Ventura, My Husband

“Para iludir minha desgraça, estudo. Intimamente sei que não me iludo.”
― Augusto dos Anjos, Eu

“[...] enkel de melancholisch gestemden, degenen die lijden aan ingebeeld verdriet, laten zich meeslepen, laten de natuur en haar elementen inwerken op hun gemoed.”
― Virginie Loveling, Erfelijk belast

“Schau und an wir sind jung. Wir haben so viele Möglichkeiten, aber keine fühlt sich richtig an. Alles ist kaputt und zerfahren und kompliziert. Was ist das für eine scheiß Welt?”
― Mareike Fallwickl, Und alle so still

“Night still lingers on. Not quite night, not quite dark. Even as the grey of dawn is prickled by stray dots of brightness, day has not yet quite broken: that otherworldly tinge of dusty in-betweenness stubbornly refuses to dissolve, as though as a reminder that a blur, nothing more, is what stands between life and the drift to a permanent sleep. It is the hour of melancholia, when inward clouds seep out and even the most lustrous of colours are painted dullish blue.”
― Panayotis Cacoyannis, IMAGINING MORE and Other Stories

“I don’t remember your middle name, but I remember the way the light hit your hair and how the world paused when you smiled.”
― Lokesh Tuli, Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”