Mary Shelley Quotes
How mutable are our feelings, and how strange is that clinging love we have of life even in the excess of misery!
Mary Shelley
(Frankenstein, 1818)
Live, and be happy, and make others so.
I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt.
Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.
I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel...
"Man," I cried, "How ignorant art thou in thy pride of wisdom!"
Every where I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded.
Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.
Nothing contributes so much to tranquillize the mind as a steady purpose.
Perfect happiness is an attribute of angels; and those who have it, appear angelic
I shall die... I shall no longer see the sun or stars or feel the winds play on my cheeks.
Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.
The very winds whispered in soothing accents, and maternal Nature bade me weep no more.
Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.
Every thing must have a beginning ... and that beginning must be linked to something that went before.
Thus strangely are our souls constructed, and by slight ligaments are we bound to prosperity and ruin.
The companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain.
Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.
The agony of my feelings allowed me no respite; no incident occurred from which my rage and misery could not extract its food.
The moon gazed on my midnight labours, while, with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding-places.
Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose -- a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.
My dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed - my dearest pleasure when free.
With how many things are we on the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our inquiries.
The world to me was a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own.
Her countenance was all expression; her eyes were not dark but impenetrably deep; you seemed to discover space after space in their intellectual glance.
A truce to philosophy! - Life is before me and I rush into possession. Hope, glory, love, and blameless ambition are my guides, and my soul knows no dread.
At the age of twenty six I am in the condition of an aged person - all my old friends are gone.. & my heart fails when I think by how few ties I hold to the world..
I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.
The whole series of my life appeared to me as a dream; I sometimes doubted if indeed it were all true, for it never presented itself to my mind with the force of reality.
You seek for knowledge and wisdom, as I once did; and I ardently hope that the gratification of your wishes may not be a serpent to sting you, as mine has been.
