Mary Shelley - Frankenstein (1818)

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Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded.

Mary Shelley
Listen to me, Frankenstein. You accuse me of murder; and yet you would, with a satisfied conscience, destroy your own creature. Oh, praise the eternal justice of man!

Mary Shelley
You, who call Frankenstein your friend, seem to have a knowledge of my crimes and his misfortunes. But in the detail which he gave you of them he could not sum up the hours and months of misery which I endured wasting in impotent passions. For while I destroyed his hopes, I did not satisfy my own desires. They were forever ardent and craving; still I desired love and fellowship, and I was still spurned. Was there no injustice in this? Am I to be thought the only criminal, when all humankind sinned against me?

Mary Shelley
Her countenance was all expression; her eyes were not dark but impenetrably deep; you seemed to discover space after space in their intellectual glance.

Mary Shelley
The idea so possessed my mind, that a thrill of fear ran through me, and I wished to exchange the ghastly image of my fancy for the realities around. I see them still; the very room, the dark parquet, the closed shutters, with the moonlight struggling through, and the sense I had that the glassy lake and white high Alps were beyond.

Mary Shelley
Thus strangely are our souls constructed and by such slight ligaments are we bound to prosperity or ruin.

Mary Shelley
So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein — more, far more, will I achieve; treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.

Mary Shelley
It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my being

Mary Shelley
Allow me now to return to the cottagers, whose story excited in me such various feelings of indignation, delight, and wonder, but which all terminated in additional love and reverence for my protectors (for so I loved, in an innocent, half painful self-deceit, to call them).

Mary Shelley
"Man," I cried, "how ignorant art thou in thy pride of wisdom!"

Mary Shelley
From my infancy I was imbued with high hopes and a lofty ambition.

Mary Shelley
One man's life or death were but a small price to pay for the acquirement of the knowledge which I sought

Mary Shelley
From my birth I have aspired like the eagle - but unlike the eagle, my wings have failed.... Congratulate me then that I have found a fitting scope for my powers.

Mary Shelley
I cherished hope, it is true, but it vanished when my person reflected...

Mary Shelley
I leave a sad and bitter world; and if you remember me, and think of me as of one unjustly condemned, I am resigned to the fate awaiting me.

Mary Shelley
A man would make but a very sorry chemist if he attended to that department of human knowledge alone. If your wish is to become really a man of science, and not merely a petty experimentalist, I should advise you to apply to every branch of natural philosophy, including mathematics.

Mary Shelley
My father was not scientific, and I was left to struggle with a child's blindness, added to a student's thirst for knowledge.

Mary Shelley
I paused, examining and analysing all the minutiae of causation...

Mary Shelley
The ambition of the enquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.

Mary Shelley
I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs...

Mary Shelley
Chemistry is that branch of natural philosophy in which the greatest improvements have been and may be made.

Mary Shelley
I heard the rumbling thunder of the falling avalanche and marked the smoke of its passage.

Mary Shelley
The guilty are allowed, by human laws, bloody as they are, to speak in their own defence before they are condemned.

Mary Shelley
I, a miserable wretch, haunted by a curse that shut up every avenue to enjoyment.

Mary Shelley