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“My mind is something like the ghost of an ancient, wandering about the world and trying mentally to construct it as it used to be, in spite of ruin and confusing changes.”

“Women were expected to have weak opinions; but the great safeguard of society and of domestic lives was, that opinions were not acted on.”

“Since I can do no good because a woman, Reach constantly at something that is near it.”

The Maid’s Tragedy: Beaumont and Fletcher

“Life is obstinate, and clings closest where it is most hated.”

“The cup of life was poisoned for ever; and although the sun shone upon me, as upon the happy and gay of heart, I saw around me nothing but a dense and frightful darkness, penetrated by no light but the glimmer of two eyes that glared upon me.”

“How mutable are our feelings, and how strange is that clinging love we have of life even in the excess of misery!”

“But I am a blasted tree; the bolt has entered my soul; and I felt then that I should survive to exhibit what I shall soon cease to be—a miserable spectacle of wretched humanity, pitiable to others, and intolerable to myself.”

“I too can create desolation; my enemy is not invulnerable; this death will carry despair to him, and a thousand other miseries shall torment and destroy him.”

“Many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition; for often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me.”

“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.”

“If such lovely creatures were miserable, it was less strange that I, an imperfect and solitary being, should be wretched.”

“Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.”

“All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all things.”

“If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst, and desire, we might nearly be free; but now we are moved by every wind that blows and a chance word or scene that that word may convey to us.”

“Nothing is more painful to the human mind than, after the feelings have been worked up by a quick succession of events, the dead calmness of inaction and certainty which follows and deprives the soul both of hope and fear.”

“Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.”

“Destiny was too potent, and her immutable laws had decreed my utter and terrible destruction.”

“There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand. I am practically industrious—painstaking; a workman to execute with perseverance and labour: — but besides this, there is a love for the marvelous, a belief in the marvelous, intertwined in all my projects, which hurries me out of the common pathways of men, even to the wild sea and unvisited regions I am about to explore.”

“And I felt ready to live it all again too. As if that blind rage has washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.”

“What did other people’s deaths or a mother’s love matter to me; why did his God or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we’re all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also called themselves my brothers? Couldn’t he see, couldn’t he see that? Everybody was privileged.”

“Whether it was now or twenty years from now, I would still be the one dying.”

“What really counted was the possibility of escape, a leap to freedom, out of the implacable ritual, a wild run for it that would give whatever chance for hope there was. Of course, hope meant being cut down on some street corner, as you ran like mad, by a random bullet.”

“Everything was against it; I would just be caught up in the machinery again.”

“But I couldn’t quite understand how an ordinary man’s good qualities could become crushing accusations against a guilty man.”

“And yet something had changed, since it was back to my cell that I went to wait for the next day… as if familiar paths traced in summer skies could lead as easily to prison as to the sleep of the innocent.”

“It was then I felt a stirring go through the room and for the first time I realized that I was guilty.”

“No, there was no way out, and no one can imagine what nights in prison are like.”

“I would have waited for birds do fly by or clouds to mingle, just as here I waited to see my lawyer’s ties and just as, in another world, I used to wait patiently until Saturday to hold Marie’s body in my arms.”