Many years ago, I contracted an intimacy with a Mr. William Legrand. He was of an ancient Huguenot family, and had once been wealthy; but a series of misfortunes had reduced him to want.
And so being young and dipped in folly I fell in love with melancholy.
But Psyche uplifting her finger said: Sadly this star I mistrust.
As a poet and as a mathematician, he would reason well; as a mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all.
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best have gone to their eternal rest.
In other words, I believed, and still do believe, that truth, is frequently of its own essence, superficial, and that, in many cases, the depth lies more in the abysses where we seek her, than in the actual situations wherein she may be found.
It would be mockery to call such dreariness heaven at all.
Alas! for that accursed time They bore thee o’er the billow, From love to titled age and crime, And an unholy pillow! From me, and from our misty clime, Where weeps the silver willow!
True! – nervous – very, very nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?
The pioneers and missionaries of religion have been the real cause of more trouble and war than all other classes of mankind.
It all depends on the robber’s knowledge of the loser’s knowledge of the robber. – Daupin.
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
For my own part, I have never had a thought which I could not set down in words, with even more distinctness than that with which I conceived it.
Tell me truly, I implore – Is there – is there balm in Gilead? – tell me – tell me, I implore!
To die laughing must be the most glorious of all glorious deaths!
If you are ever drowned or hung, be sure and make a note of your sensations.
I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him.
I found him well educated, with unusual powers of mind, but infected with misanthropy, and subject to perverse moods of alternate enthusiasm and melancholy.
To him, who still would gaze upon the glory of the summer sun, there comes, when that sun will from him part, a sullen hopelessness of heart.
I was a child and she was a child, In this kingdom by the sea; But we loved with a love that was more than love- I and my Annabel Lee; With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven Coveted her and me.
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.