I suppose there's a melancholy tone at the back of the American mind a sense of something lost. And it's the lost world of Thomas Jefferson. It is the lost sense of innocence that we could live with a very minimal state with a vast sense of space in which to work out freedom.

I know not why there is such a melancholy feeling attached to the remembrance of past happiness except that we fear that the future can have nothing so bright as the past.

Christmas can have a real melancholy aspect 'cause it packages itself as this idea of perfect family cohesion and love and you're always going to come up short when you measure your personal life against the idealized personal lives that are constantly thrust in our faces primarily by TV commercials.

All changes even the most longed for have their melancholy for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves we must die to one life before we can enter another.

There is something sinister something quite biographical about what I do - but that part is for me. It's my personal business. I think there is a lot of romance melancholy. There's a sadness to it but there's romance in sadness. I suppose I am a very melancholy person.

Do not make best friends with a melancholy sad soul. They always are heavily loaded and you must bear half.

I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.

A comfortable old age is the reward of a well-spent youth. Instead of its bringing sad and melancholy prospects of decay it would give us hopes of eternal youth in a better world.