To read

“To read were futile – to write, vanity indeed.” 

Mary Shelley

The choice is with us

“The choice is with us; let us will it, & our habitation becomes a paradise. For the will of man is omnipotent, blunting the arrows of death, soothing the bed of disease, & wiping away the tears of agony. And what is each human being worth, if he do not put forth his strength to aid his fellow-creatures?”

Mary Shelley

What a sea is the tide of passion

“What a sea is the tide of passion whose fountains are in our own nature!”

Mary Shelley

Did God create man

“Did God create man, merely in the end to become dead earth in the midst of healthful vegetating nature? Was he of no more account to his Maker, than a field of corn blighted in the ear? Were our proud dreams thus to fade? Our name was written ‘a little lower than the angels;’ & behold, we were not better than ephemera. We had called ourselves the ‘paragon of animals’, &, lo! we were a ‘quintessence of dust."

Mary Shelley
The Last Man

I am the fallen angel

“I am the fallen angel, whom thou has drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded.”

Mary Shelley
Frankenstein

Of what a strange nature is knowledge

“Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind when it has once seized on it like a lichen on the rock.”

Mary Shelley

The guilty are allowed by human laws

“The guilty are allowed by human laws, bloody as they are, to speak in their own defense before they are condemned.”

Mary Shelley