Edgar Allan Poe Quotes
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Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her,And tempted her out of her gloom.
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'Over the MountainsOf the Moon,Down the Valley of the Shadow,Ride, boldly ride,'The shade replied, - 'If you seek for Eldorado!'
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There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction.
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The fever called "living" Is conquer'd at last.
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As an individual, I myself feel impelled to fancy ... a limitless succession of Universes.... Each exists, apart and independently, in the bosom of its proper and particular God.
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The unity of effect or impression is a point of the greatest importance. It is clear, moreover, that this unity cannot be thoroughly preserved in productions whose perusal cannot be completed at one sitting.
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Sound loves to revel in a summer night.
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In reading some books we occupy ourselves chiefly with the thoughts of the author; in perusing others, exclusively with our own.
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I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him.
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There is then no analogy whatever between the operations of the Chess-Player, and those of the calculating machine of Mr. Babbage, and if we choose to call the former a pure machine we must be prepared to admit that it is, beyond all comparison, the most wonderful of the inventions of mankind.
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Were the succession of stars endless, then the background of the sky would present us an uniform luminosity, like that displayed by the Galaxy-since there could be absolutely no point, in all that background, at which would not exist a star. The only mode, therefore, in which, under such a state of affairs, we could comprehend the voids which our telescopes find in innumerable directions, would be by supposing the distance of the invisible background so immense that no ray from it has yet been able to reach us at all.
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Had the routine of our life at this place been known to the world, we should have been regarded as madmen -; although, perhaps, as madmen of a harmless nature.
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In the greenest of our valleysBy good angels tenanted,Once a fair and stately palace - Radiant palace - reared its head.
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Lo! Death has reared himself a throneIn a strange city lying aloneFar down within the dim West,Where the good and the bad and the worst and the bestHave gone to their eternal rest.
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Hear the mellow wedding bells, Golden bells! What a world of happiness their harmony foretells Through the balmy air of night How they ring out their delight! From the molten golden notes, And all in tune What a liquid ditty floats To the turtle-dove that listens while she gloats On the moon!
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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.
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There neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified - more supremely noble than this very poem - this poem per se - this poem which is a poem and nothing more - this poem written solely for the poem's sake.
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A dark unfathom'd tide Of interminable pride - A mystery, and a dream, Should my early life seem.
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For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not - and very surely do I not dream. But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul.
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Whether people grow fat by joking, or whether there is something in fat itself which predisposes to a joke, I have never been quite able to determine.
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So blend the turrets and shadows thereThat all seem pendulous in air,While from a proud tower in the townDeath looks gigantically down.
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The enormous multiplication of books in every branch of knowledge is one of the greatest evils of this age, since it presents one of the most serious obstacles to the acquisition of correct information by throwing in the reader's way piles of lumber in which he must painfully grope for the scraps of useful matter, peradventure interspersed.
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I stand amid the roar Of a surf-tormented shore, And I hold within my hand Grains of golden sand- How few! yet how they creep Through my fingers to the deep, While I weep- while I weep!
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I was cautious in what I said before the young lady; for I could not be sure that she was sane; and, in fact, there was a certain restless brilliancy about her eyes that half led me to imagine she was not.