When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves. In vain we call upon the Lord of Shades, the bestower of a precise curse: we are invalids without disease, and reprobates without vices. Melancholy is the dream state of egoism: no longer any object outside oneself, no reason for hate or love, but that some fall into a languid mud, that same circling of the damned without a hell, those same reiterations of a zeal to perish… Whereas sadness is content with a circumstantial context, melancholy requires a debauch of space, an infinite landscape in order to spread out its sullen and vaporous grace, its shapeless evil, which, fearing to recover, dreads any limit to its dissolution and its undulation. It expands – strangest flower of self-love – among the poisons from which it extracts its vital juices and the vigor of all its failures. Feeding on what corrupts it, melancholy hides, under its melodious name, Self-Commiseration and the Pride of Defeat.

E. M Cioran, A Short History of Decay (via thebadluckbird)