Variant: My melancholy is the most faithful mistress I have known; what wonder, then, that I love her in return.
Source: Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 2, Student Years, p. 37
The Crisis No. II.
1770s, The American Crisis (1776–1783)
Quoted in "The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations" - Page 873 - by Robert Andrews - Reference - 1993.
Source: Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and the Poet (1983), p. 94
Fred Astaire in "Reminiscences of Fred Astaire", Interview with Ronald L. Davis, Beverly Hills, July 31, 1978, SMU Oral History Project on the Performing Arts. (M).
“Sweet bird, that shunn'st the noise of folly,
Most musical, most melancholy!”
Source: Il Penseroso (1631), Line 61
“I do have a strong faith and always have had”
Context: I do have a strong faith and always have had, I’m not a regular churchgoer now but I’m in church a lot – to do readings, to attend events and so on. I had a strong church upbringing which I think has been invaluable to me in terms of a moral compass – of some idea of what’s acceptable and what is not acceptable. I have a Presbyterian nature in that I like its ideas of individual responsibility and democracy. I’m naturally suspicious of people who wear religion heavily on their sleeves – that’s just not me and my style.
“I too, having lost faith
in language, have placed my faith in language.”
Lighthead (2010), "Snow for Wallace Stevens"
The Age for Love
Context: I bore with the ill-humor of my chief. What would he have said if he had known that I had in my pocket an interview and in my head an anecdote which were material for a most successful story? And he has never had either the interview or the story. Since then I have made my way in the line where he said I should fail. I have lost my innocent look and I earn my thirty thousand francs a year, and more. I have never had the same pleasure in the printing of the most profitable, the most brilliant article that I had in consigning to oblivion the sheets relating my visit to Nemours. I often think that I have not served the cause of letters as I wanted to, since, with all my laborious work I have never written a book. And yet when I recall the irresistible impulse of respect which prevented me from committing toward a dearly loved master a most profitable but infamous indiscretion, I say to myself, "If you have not served the cause of letters, you have not betrayed it." And this is the reason, now that Fauchery is no longer of this world, that it seems to me that the time has come for me to relate my first interview. There is none of which I am more proud.
