Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.

I ask for nothing but to live in my suffering.

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

At the heart of all great art is an essential melancholy.

Art has the power to render sorrow beautiful, make loneliness a shared experience, and transform despair into hope.

Art is to console those who are broken by life.

I close my eyes
and try to chew the root of some grass
to suck the juice of some grass to suck the bitter juice of melancholy
indeed there's no hope for anything there
life's just a series of meaningless melancholies

I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity.

But where is the antidote for lucid despair, perfectly articulated, proud, and sure? All of us are miserable, but how many know it? The consciousness of misery is too serious a disease to figure in an arithmetic of agonies or in the catalogues of the Incurable. It belittles the prestige of hell, and converts the slaughterhouses of time into idyls. What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist? Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle. . .

All my joys to this are folly
Naught so sweet as melancholy.

There is no pathos in real misery, no luxury in real grief.

[Mitchell wanted in her painting].. the feeling in a line of poetry which makes it different from, a line of prose.. .Sentimentality is self-pity, your own swamp. Weeping in your own beer is not a feeling. It lacks dignity and hasn't an outside reference.