Edgar Allan Poe Quotes

I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.

A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.

Lord help my poor soul.

It is the nature of truth in general, as of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial.

The pioneers and missionaries of religion have been the real cause of more trouble and war than all other classes of mankind.

The winters in the latitude of Sullivan's Island are seldom very severe, and in the fall of the year it is a rare event indeed

Even for those to whom life and death are equal jests. There are some things that are still held in respect.

I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

I rapped, as was my custom,

Scorching my seared heart with a pain, not hell shall make me fear again.

Children are never too tender to be whipped. Like tough beefsteaks, the more you beat them, the more tender they become.

True! - nervous - very, very nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?

For years your name never passed my lips, while my soul drank in, with a delirious thirst, all that was uttered in my presence respecting you ...

I went as a passenger, having no other inducement than a kind of nervous restlessness which haunted me as a fiend

And if I died, at least I died
For thee! for thee

All suffering originates from craving, from attachment, from desire.

In criticism, I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.

it has the force of a frame to a picture

I have made no money. I am as poor now as ever I was in my life - except in hope, which is by no means bankable.

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

Even in the grave, all is not lost.

I smiled, - for what had I to fear?

a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a

Of puns it has been said that those who most dislike them are those who are least able to utter them.

Actually, I do have doubts, all the time. Any thinking person does. There are so many sides to every question.

To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness.

From a proud tower in the town, Death looks gigantically down.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while

There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction.

It would be mockery to call such dreariness heaven at all.

There lives no man who at some period has not been tormented, for example, by an earnest desire to tantalize a listener by circumlocution.

In his opinion the powers of the intellect held intimate connection with the capabilities of the stomach.

There is no exquisite beauty ... without some strangeness in the proportion.

Enough," he said; "the cough is a mere nothing; it will not kill me. I shall not die of a cough." "True - true," I replied;

Every moment of the night
Forever changing places
And they put out the star-light
With the breath from their pale faces

I had done a deed - what was it?

It is with literature as with law or empire - an established name is an estate in tenure, or a throne in possession.

I do believe God gave me a spark of genius, but he quenched it in misery.

It all depends on the robber's knowledge of the loser's knowledge of the robber. - Daupin

In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

I am a writer. Therefore, I am not sane.

The look on his face frightened me terribly, but at the same time I was pleased not to be alone any more.

When a madman appears thoroughly sane, indeed, it is high time to put him in a straight jacket.

The customs of the world are so many conventional follies.

Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best have gone to their eternal rest.

The reproduction of
what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the soul.

Darkness there, and nothing more.

Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.

As a poet and as a mathematician, he would reason well; as a mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all.

Some human memories and tearful lore, Render him terrorless: his name's No More.

Mimes in the form of God on high mutter and mumble low and hither and tither fly, mere puppets they who come and go.

It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.

[The daguerreotype] itself must undoubtedly be regarded as the most important, and perhaps the most extraordinary triumph of modern science.

Decorum
that bug-bear which deters so many from bliss until the opportunity for bliss has forever gone by.

We gave him a hearty welcome, for there was nearly half as much of the entertaining as of the contemptible about the man..

All works of art should begin ... at the end.

Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day; or the agonies which are have their origins in ecstasies which might have been.

And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

I love me a good sheep.

In efforts to soar above our nature, we invariably fall below it.

Thank Heaven! The crisis /The danger is past, and the lingering illness, is over at last /, and the fever called 'Living' is conquered at last.

Have been sufficient to establish its real character. Indeed, however

It is a happiness to wonder;
it is a happiness to dream.

A fool, for example, thinks Shakespeare a great poet ... yet the fool has never read Shakespeare.

Villains!' I shrieked. 'Dissemble no more! I admit the deed! Tear up the planks! Here, here! It is the beating of his hideous heart!

His heart is a suspended lute; As soon as you touch it, it resonates.

And then there stole into my fancy, like a rich musical note, the thought of what sweet rest there must be in the grave.

It is evident that we are hurrying onward to some exciting knowledge - some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction.

The secret of a poem, no less than a jest's prosperity, lies in the ear of him that hears it.

In reading some books we occupy ourselves chiefly with the thoughts of the author; in perusing others, exclusively with our own.

Trust to the fickle star within.

I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth.I heard many things in hell.

It was well said of a certain German book that 'er lasst sich nicht lesen" - it does not permit itself to be read.

Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.

A poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul.

I call to mind flatness and dampness; and then all is madness - the madness of a memory which busies itself among forbidden things.

Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore.

I'm a writer. Therefore, I am not sane.

The rain came down upon my head - Unshelter'd. And the wind rendered me mad and deaf and blind.

When the Hours flew brightly by And not a cloud obscured the sky, My soul, lest it should truant be, Thy grace did guide to thine and

Sound loves to revel in a summer night.

I have no words - alas! - to tell
The loveliness of loving well!

We had always dwelled together, beneath a tropical sun, in the Valley of the Many Colored Grass.

I remained too much inside my head and ended up losing my mind

To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary.

I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow.

In the Heaven's above, the angels, whispering to one another, can find, among their burning terms of love, none so devotional as that of 'Mother.

LO! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone

No man who ever lived knows any more about the hereafter than you and I.

Sleep, those little slices of death - how I loathe them.

The depth lies in the valleys where we seek her, and not upon the mountain-tops where she is found.

Every poem should remind the reader that they are going to die.

It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year ...

A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young.

The world is a great ocean, upon which we encounter more tempestuous storms than calms.

Let me glimpse inside your velvet bones.

But it is a trait in the perversity of human nature to reject the obvious and the ready, for the far-distant and equivocal.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.