Edgar Allan Poe Quotes

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"Villains!" I shrieked, "dissemble no more! I admit the deed! — tear up the planks! — here, here! — it is the beating of his hideous heart!"

Edgar Allan Poe
Here once, through an alley Titanic,
Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul —
Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.

Edgar Allan Poe
I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.

Edgar Allan Poe
The Bostonians are really, as a race, far inferior in point of anything beyond mere intellect to any other set upon the continent of North America. They are decidedly the most servile imitators of the English it is possible to conceive.

Edgar Allan Poe
A poem in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth.

Edgar Allan Poe
How much more intense is the excitement wrought in the feelings of a crowd by the contemplation of human agony, than that brought about by the most appalling spectacles of inanimate matter.

Edgar Allan Poe
I shall always know what to answer, and my reply will be imposed upon me by the witness of my senses.

Edgar Allan Poe
It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

Edgar Allan Poe
Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture — a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees — very gradually — I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye for ever.

Edgar Allan Poe
The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.

Edgar Allan Poe
I dread the events of the future, not in themselves but in their results.

Edgar Allan Poe
To him, who still would gaze upon the glory of the summer sun, there comes, when that sun will from him part, a sullen hopelessness of heart.

Edgar Allan Poe
I design to speak of the Physical, Metaphysical and Mathematical — of the Material and Spiritual Universe: — of its Essence, its Origin, its Creation, its Present Condition and its Destiny.

Edgar Allan Poe
True, nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am, but why will say that I am mad?! The disease had haunted my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Of all the sense of hearing acute.

Edgar Allan Poe
There is no oath which seems to me so sacred as that sworn by the all-divine love I bear you. — By this love, then, and by the God who reigns in Heaven, I swear to you that my soul is incapable of dishonor — that, with the exception of occasional follies and excesses which I bitterly lament, but to which I have been driven by intolerable sorrow, and which are hourly committed by others without attracting any notice whatever — I can call to mind no act of my life which would bring a blush to my cheek — or to yours. If I have erred at all, in this regard, it has been on the side of what the world would call a Quixotic sense of the honorable — of the chivalrous.

Edgar Allan Poe
Man's real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so.

Edgar Allan Poe
While the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, "Man",
And its hero the Conqueror Worm.

Edgar Allan Poe
There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of him who, shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a Plunge.

Edgar Allan Poe
It is clear that a poem may be improperly brief. Undue brevity degenerates into mere epigrammatism. A very short poem, while now and then producing a brilliant or vivid, never produces a profound or enduring, effect. There must be the steady pressing down of the stamp upon the wax.

Edgar Allan Poe
Eagerly I wished the morrow,—vainly had I sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
Nameless here for evermore.

Edgar Allan Poe
Children are never too tender to be whipped. Like tough beefsteaks, the more you beat them, the more tender they become.

Edgar Allan Poe
A dark unfathom'd tide
Of interminable pride —
A mystery, and a dream,
Should my early life seem.

Edgar Allan Poe
If you do not take it up with you in some way, I shall be under the necessity of breaking your head with this shovel

Edgar Allan Poe
I call to mind flatness and dampness; and then all is madness - the madness of a memory which busies itself among forbidden things.

Edgar Allan Poe
I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect - in terror.

Edgar Allan Poe