Tis not the times, 'Tis not the Sophists vex him:
There is some root of suffering in himself,
Some secret and unfollow'd vein of woe,
Which makes the times look black and sad to him.

<i>Empedocles on Etna: Act I, Scene I</i>

I sometimes have moments of such despair, such despair … Because in those moments I start to think that I will never be capable of beginning to live a real life; because I have already begun to think that I have lost all sense of proportion, all sense of the real and the actual; because, what is more, I have cursed myself; because my nights of fantasy are followed by hideous moments of sobering! And all the time one hears the human crowd swirling and thundering around one in the whirlwind of life, one hears, one sees how people live — that they live in reality, that for them life is not something forbidden, that their lives are not scattered for the winds like dreams or visions but are forever in the process of renewal, forever young, and that no two moments in them are ever the same; while how dreary and monotonous to the point of being vulgar is timorous fantasy, the slave of shadow, of the idea...

He that talkes much of his happinesse summons griefe.

GUIL: It [Hamlet's madness] really boils down to symptoms. Pregnant replies, mystic allusions, mistaken identities, arguing his father is his mother, that sort of thing; intimations of suicide, forgoing of exercise, loss of mirth, hints of claustrophobia not to say delusions of imprisonment; invocations of camels, chameleons, capons, whales, weasels, hawks, handsaws — riddles, quibbles and evasions; amnesia, paranoia, myopia; day-dreaming, hallucinations; stabbing his elders, abusing his parents, insulting his lover, and appearing hatless in public — knock-kneed, droop-stockinged and sighing like a love-sick schoolboy, which at his age is coming on a bit strong.

ROS: And talking to himself.

GUIL: And talking to himself.

I think this man is suffering from memories.

If you keep walking back from good luck, he thought, you’ll come to bad luck.

...and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky...

But at this moment he surely knows sorrow
No less than the wise and the old.
It seems that his eyes have begun to grow narrow,
And their brilliant light is now cold.

His ironies were ghoulish now.

When ill luck begins, it does not come in sprinkles, but in showers.

He who worries about calamities suffers them twice over.

Looks like someone had a mood swing.” She rolls her eyes. “Like you don’t want to
know what his fears are. He acts so tough that he’s probably afraid of marshmallows
and really bright sunrises or something.

When he came home that night he was in a very somber mood, having begun to see at last how those might be right who had laughed at him for his faith in America.

Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods. I do not know how far my
experience is common. At times I suffer from the strangest sense of
detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all
from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time,
out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all. This feeling
was very strong upon me that night. Here was another side to my
dream.