Tagged: Melancholy

“Sometimes I’m walking along the street and a shaft of sunlight falls in a certain way across the pavement and I just want to cry. Then a second later it’s over, and I decide…because I’m an adult. I decide to not succumb to the momentary melancholy…” –Take this Waltz

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Toska – noun /ˈtō-skə/ – Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness.

“No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”
-Vladimir Nabokov, cited in A Field Guide to Melancholy, by Jacky Bowring

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