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I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect - in terror.
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I grew, day by day, more moody, more irritable, more regardless of the feelings of others. I suffered myself to use intemperate language to my wife. At length, I even offered her personal violence.
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And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtainThrilled me - filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before.
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Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.
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There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion.
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And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.
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I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread the events of the future, not in themselves, but in their results. I shudder at the thought of any, even the most trivial, incident, which may operate upon this intolerable agitation of soul. I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect-in terror. In this unnerved-in this pitiable condition-I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR.
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The scariest monsters are the ones that lurk within our souls.
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Tell a scoundrel, three or four times a day, that he is the pink of probity, and you make him at least the perfection of "respectability" in good earnest. On the other hand, accuse an honorable man, too petinaciously, of being a villain, and you fill him with a perverse ambition to show you that you are not altogether in the wrong.
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I have great faith in fools; self-confidence my friends call it.
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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!'
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Man's real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so.
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I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
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To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness.
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It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.
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And as, in ethics, Evil is a consequence of Good, so, in fact, out of Joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are, have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.
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And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floorShall be lifted - nevermore!
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We loved with a love that was more than love.
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The generous Critic fann'd the Poet's fire, And taught the world with reason to admire.
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There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.
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Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea without the music is prose from its very definitiveness.
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Every poem should remind the reader that they are going to die.
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Sometimes I’m terrified of my heart; of its constant hunger for whatever it is it wants. The way it stops and starts.
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To die laughing must be the most glorious of all glorious deaths!