Edgar Allan Poe Quotes
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Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,The Elfin from the green grass, and from meThe summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?
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While, like a ghastly rapid river,Through the pale doorA hideous throng rush out foreverAnd laugh - but smile no more.
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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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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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Convinced myself, I seek not to convince.
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Here once, through an alley Titanic,Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul - Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.
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Perversity is the human thirst for self-torture.
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That single thought is enough. The impulse increases to a wish, the wish to a desire, the desire to an uncontrollable longing, and the longing (to the deep regret and mortification of the speaker, and in defiance of all consequences,) is indulged.
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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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Thou wouldst be loved? - then let thy heartFrom its present pathway part not!Being everything which now thou art,Be nothing which thou art not.So with the world thy gentle ways,Thy grace, thy more than beauty,Shall be an endless theme of praise,And love - a simple duty.
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Years of love have been forgotIn the hatred of a minute.
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Few persons can be made to believe that it is not quite an easy thing to invent a method of secret writing that shall baffle investigation. Yet it may be roundly asserted that human ingenuity cannot concoct a cipher which human ingenuity cannot resolve.
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The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame.
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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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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 remained too much inside my head and ended up losing my mind.
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Thank Heaven! the crisis -The danger is past,And the lingering illnessIs over at last -And the fever called 'Living'Is conquered at last.
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Hear the mellow wedding bellsGolden bells!What a world of happiness their harmony foretellsThrough the balmy air of nightHow they ring out their delight!
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Always keep a big bottle of booze at your side. If a bird starts talking nonsense to you in the middle of the night pour yourself a stiff drink.
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By undue profundity we perplex and enfeeble thought; and it is possible to make even Venus herself vanish from the firmament by a scrutiny too sustained, too concentrated, or too direct.
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This-all this-was in the oldenTime long ago.
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And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.
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Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.
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As for Republicanism, no analogy could be found for it upon the face of the earth—unless we except the case of the "prairie dogs," an exception which seems to demonstrate, if anything, that democracy is a very admirable form of government—for dogs.