"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 felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"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: A Novel of Ray Bradbury's Adventures Making Moby Dick with John Huston in Ireland)

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

"The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving."
— Oscar Wilde (De Profundis)

"Feelings of love are just a temporary lapse in judgment. Like a kind of mental illness."
— Haruhi Suzumiya

"Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness."
— Italo Calvino

"In addition to my numerous other acquaintances I have still one more intimate friend—my melancholy. In the midst of pleasure, in the midst of work, he beckons to me, calls me aside, even though I remain present bodily. My melancholy is the most faithful sweetheart I have had—no wonder that I return the love!"
— Søren Kierkegaard

"Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night."
— Virginia Woolf (Jacob's Room)

"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)

"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

"An unchangeable colour rules over the melancholic: his dwelling is a space the colour of mourning. Nothing happens in it. No one intrudes. It is a bare stage where the inert I is assisted by the I suffering from that inertia. The latter wishes to free the former, but all efforts fail, as Theseus would have failed had he been not only himself but also the Minotaur; to kill him then, he would have had to kill himself"
— Alejandra Pizarnik

"I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that i appear generous in order to conceal my meaness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage that I am punctual only to hide how little I care about other people's time. I learned in short, that love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"The soulless have no need of melancholia"
— Vladimir Odoevsky

"You're in a bad way! Apparently, you've developed a soul."
— Yevgeny Zamyatin (We)