“Melancholy is an intimate aspect of human nature, while depression, like any other illness, creates fear and perplexity. Melancholy can displayed, depression is usually hidden. When transformed into a depression, melancholy becomes a defeat.”

“The melancholy can be black as suicide, gray as depression, white as emptiness and blue as mood. It may appear as fear, boredom, longing, fatigue, emptiness, anxiety, or a forced search for pleasure. However, there is always a lack or loss that lies beneath.”

“Something is lost, but a person does not know what it is; this feeling is indescribable in words, and therefore, it can be experienced only as the emptiness.”

“Depression is melancholy minus its charms.”

“Men marry women who see through their bullshit, and women marry men they can't seduce, at least according to Lou. It's the only way you can live with each other over long periods of time and get things done, raising kids and buying houses and all the other nonsense of matrimony and human striving. To Judith, this was a depressing thought. She wanted to marry a man who was so crazy for her he couldn't see straight.”

“But this was the thought of a depressive. An aspiring depressive, at the time. That was the odd thing about Leonard’s disease, the almost pleasurable way it began. At first his dark moods were closer to melancholy than to despair. There was something enjoyable about wandering around the city alone, feeling forlorn. There was even a sense of superiority, of being right, in not liking the things other kids liked.”

“Melancholy suicide. —This is connected with a general state of extreme depression and exaggerated sadness, causing the patient no longer to realize sanely the bonds which connect him with people and things about him. Pleasures no longer attract;”