Sheridan Le Fanu Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

"The world," he resumed after a short pause, "has no faith in any man's conversion; it never forgets what he was, it never believes him anything better, it is an inexorable and stupid judge."

Sheridan Le Fanu
Women are so enigmatical – some in everything – all in matters of the heart. Don't they sometimes actually admire what is repulsive?...

Sheridan Le Fanu
What a fool I was! and yet, in the sight of angels, are we any wiser as we grow older? It seems to me, only, that our illusions change as we go on; but, still, we are madmen all the same.

Sheridan Le Fanu
How marvellously lie our anxieties, in filmy layers, one over the other! Take away that which has lain on the upper surface for so long – the care of cares – the only one, as it seemed to you, between your soul and the radiance of Heaven – and straight you find a new stratum there.

Sheridan Le Fanu
There is no dealing with great sorrow as if it were under the control of our wills. It is a terrible phenomenon, whose laws we must study, and to whose conditions we must submit, if we would mitigate it.

Sheridan Le Fanu
There is no such sense of solitude as that which we experience upon the silent and vast elevations of great mountains. Lifted high above the level of human sounds and habitations, among the wild expanses and colossal features of Nature, we are thrilled in our loneliness with a strange fear and elation – an ascent above the reach of life's expectations or companionship, and the tremblings of a wild and undefined misgivings.

Sheridan Le Fanu
You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish. How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me, and still come with me, and hating me through death and after. There is no such word as indifference in my apathetic nature.

Sheridan Le Fanu
But dreams come through stone walls, light up dark rooms, or darken light ones, and their persons make their exits and their entrances as they please, and laugh at locksmiths.

Sheridan Le Fanu
But to die as lovers may - to die together, so that they may live together.

Sheridan Le Fanu
Nevertheless, life and death are mysterious states, and we know little of the resources of either.

Sheridan Le Fanu
Knowledge is power-and power of one sort or another is the secret lust of human souls; and here is, beside the sense of exploration, the undefinable interest of a story, and above all, something forbidden, to stimulate the contumacious appetite.

Sheridan Le Fanu
There comes with old age a time when the heart is no longer fusible or malleable, and must retain the form in which it has cooled down.

Sheridan Le Fanu
I remember everything about it—with an effort. I see it all, as divers see what is going on above them, through a medium, dense, rippling, but transparent.

Sheridan Le Fanu
No one likes a straight road but the man who pays for it, or who, when he travels, is brute enough to wish to get to his journey's end.

Sheridan Le Fanu