Edgar Allan Poe Quotes

would a madman have been so wise as this? ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Ah, Death, the spectre which sate at all feasts! How often, Monos, did we lose ourselves in speculations upon its nature! How mysteriously did it act as a check to human bliss - saying unto it thus far, and no farther! ~ Edgar Allan Poe

About the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity - an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn - a pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hue ~ Edgar Allan Poe

You call it hope - that fire of fire!
It is but agony of desire. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

But Psyche uplifting her finger said: Sadly this star I mistrust ~ Edgar Allan Poe

The best things in life make you sweaty. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it 'the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.' The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of 'Artist.' ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Here, at last, he is happy. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Art was, for Poe, the only method by which one could penetrate the shapeless empirical world in the search for order, and ~ Edgar Allan Poe

The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

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. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Sleep, those little slices of death - how I loathe them. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Marking a book is literally an experience of your differences or agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

It may be roundly asserted that human ingenuity cannot concoct a cipher which human ingenuity cannot resolve. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

All around were horror, and thick gloom, and a black sweltering desert of ebony. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Science has its place in man's search for understanding, but science and the imagination have tended to bifurcate in the modern world; only the true poetic intellect can end this long-established dualism. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Very suddenly there came back to my soul motion and sound - the tumultuous motion of the heart, and, in my ears, the sound of its beating. Then a pause in which all is blank. Then again sound, and motion, and touch - a tingling sensation pervading my frame. Then the mere consciousness of existence, without thought - a condition which lasted long. Then, very suddenly, thought, and shuddering terror, and earnest endeavor to comprehend my true state. Then a strong desire to lapse into insensibility. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

The principle of vis inertiae ( ... ) seems to be identical in physics and metaphysics. It is not more true in the former, that a large body is with more difficulty set in motion than a smaller one, and that its subsequent momentum is commensurate with this difficulty, than it is, in the latter, that intellects of the vaster capacity, while more forcible, more constant, and more eventful in their movements than those of inferior grade, are yet the less readily moved, and more embarrassed, and full of hesitation in the first few steps of their progress ~ Edgar Allan Poe

In the marginalia ... we talk only to ourselves; we therefore talk freshly - boldly - originally - with abandonment - without conceit. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

I rapped, as was my custom, ~ Edgar Allan Poe

No murmur arose from its bed, and so gently it wandered along, that the pearly pebbles upon which we loved to gaze, far down within its bosom, stirred not at all, but lay in a motionless content, each in its own old station, shining on gloriously forever. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Oh, outcast of all outcasts most abandoned!
to the earth art thou not forever dead? to its honors, to its flowers, to its golden aspirations?
and a cloud, dense, dismal, and limitless, does it not hang eternally between thy hopes and heaven? ~ Edgar Allan Poe

TEKELI-LI. Tekeli-li, Tekeli-li. I got that from Pym. I got that from Poe. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe, specifically. Pym that is maddening, Pym that is brilliance, Pym whose failures entice instead of repel. Pym that flows and ignites and Pym that becomes so entrenched it stagnates for hundreds of words at a time. A book that at points makes no sense, gets wrong both history and science, and yet stumbles into an emotional truth greater than both. ~ Mat Johnson

The want of an international Copy-Right Law, by rendering it nearly impossible to obtain anything from the booksellers in the wayof remuneration for literary labor, has had the effect of forcing many of our very best writers into the service of the Magazines and Reviews. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

No thinking being lives who, at some luminous point of his life of thought, has not felt himself lost amid the surges of futile efforts at understanding, or believing, that anything exists greater than his own soul. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

A mystery, and a dream, should my early life seem. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

About noon, as nearly as we could guess, our attention was again arrested by the appearance of the sun. It gave out no light, properly so called, but a dull and sudden glow without reflection, as if all its rays were polarized. Just before sinking within the turgid sea, its central fires suddenly went out, as if hurriedly extinguished by some unaccountable power. It was a dim, silver-like rim, alone, as it rushed down the unfathomable ocean. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Here the vast bed of waters, seamed and scarred into a thousand conflicting channels, burst suddenly into phrensied convulsion-heaving, boiling, hissing-gyrating in gigantic and innumerable vortices, and all whirling and plunging on to the eastward with a rapidity which water never elsewhere assumes except in precipitous descents. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Melancholy is ... the most legitimate of all the poetical tones. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

How often we forget all time, when lone Admiring Nature's universal throne; Her woods - her wilds - her mountains - the intense Reply of HERS to OUR intelligence! ~ Edgar Allan Poe

I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of beauty. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

The wine sparkled in his eyes ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Never to suffer would never to have been blessed. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

I pacified Psyche and kissed her, ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Is it not indeed, possible that, while a high order of genius is necessarily ambitious, the highest is above that which is termed ambition? And may it not thus happen that many far greater than Milton have contentedly remained "mute and inglorious"? I believe that the world has never seen - and that, unless through some series of accidents goading the noblest order of mind into distateful exertion, the world will never see - that full extent of triumphant execution, in the richer domains of art, of which the human nature is absolutely capable. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

In beauty of face no maiden ever equaled her. It was the radiance of an opium-dream - an airy and spirit-lifting vision more wildly divine than the fantasies which hovered about the slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

A strong argument for the religion of Christ is this - that offenses against Charity are about the only ones which men on their death-beds can be made - not to understand - but to feel - as crime. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

If you run out of ideas follow the road; you'll get there ~ Edgar Allan Poe

This accident, with the loss of my insurance, and with the more serious loss of my hair, - the whole of which had been singed off by fire, - predisposed me to serious impressions, so that, finally, I made up my mind to take a wife. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

I would like that very much. You have a bargain, lady. I will find you here among the lost souls, trapped women, and birds. I find that my own state has improved, if only slightly. Where I was once likely to travel in the presence of a murder of crows, I find I will only be burdened by an unkindness of ravens. It gives me heart." - A. E. Poe in Nevermore ~ David Niall Wilson

Those eyes! those large, those shining, those divine orbs! they became to me twin stars of Leda, and I to them devoutest of astrologers ~ Edgar Allan Poe

That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

The history of human knowledge has so uninterruptedly shown that to collateral, or incidental, or accidental events we are indebted for the most numerous and most valuable discoveries, that it has at length become necessary, in any prospective view of improvement, to make not only large, but the largest allowances for inventions that shall arise by chance, and quite out of the range of ordinary expectation. It is no longer philosophical to base, upon what has been, a vision of what is to be. Accident is admitted as a portion of the substructure. We make chance a matter of absolute calculation. We subject the unlooked for and unimagined, to the mathematical formulae of the schools. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

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

there is no beauty without some strangeness. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

I have great faith in fools - self-confidence my friends will call it. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

The customs of the world are so many conventional follies. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

These were the days when my heart was volcanic. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

This latter was a remarkably large and beautiful animal, entirely black, and sagacious to an astonishing degree. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Those who gossip with you will gossip about you. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man." ~ 'The Black Cat. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

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. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

The realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn, - not the material of my every-day existence
but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path. I shall be a litterateur, at least, all my life; nor would I abandon the hopes which still lead me on for all the gold in California.
EDGAR ALLAN POE TO FREDERICK WILLIAM THOMAS
FEBRUARY 14, 1849 ~ Andrew Barger

Ceux qui revent eveilles ont conscience de 1000 choses qui echapent a ceux qui ne revent qu'endormis.
The one who has day dream are aware of 1000 things that the one who dreams only when he sleeps will never understand.
(it sounds better in french, I do what I can with my translation ... ) ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Lo! 'tis a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears [ ... ] ~ Edgar Allan Poe

When reason returned with the morning - when I had slept off the fumes of the night's debauch - I experienced a sentiment half of horror, half of remorse, for the crime of which I had been guilty; but it was, at best, a feeble and equivocal feeling, and the soul remained untouched. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Because it was my crime to have no one on Earth who cared for me, or loved me. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Wasn't he the one who sliced off his ear and mailed it to his girlfriend?"
"Van Gogh," said Varen, in a monotone that suggested he might be in pain.
"Van Gogh," Gwen said, leaning away, waving the apple. "Edgar Allan Poe. Close enough! ~ Kelly Creagh

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

These trifles are collected and republished chiefly with a view to their redemption from the many improvements to which they have been subjected while going at random the "rounds of the press." I am naturally anxious that what I have written should circulate as I wrote it, if it circulate at all. In defence of my own taste, nevertheless, it is incumbent upon me to say that I think nothing in this volume of much value to the public, or very creditable to myself. Events not to be controlled have prevented me from making, at any time, any serious effort in what, under happier circumstances, would have been the field of my choice. With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence: they must not - they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind. 1845. E. A. P. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Darkness there, and nothing more. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

The higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

The disease which had thus entombed the lady in the maturity of youth, had left, as usual in all maladies of a strictly cataleptical character, the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death ~ Edgar Allan Poe

How long have you had that cough?" "Ugh! ugh! ugh! - ugh! ugh! ugh! - ugh! ugh! ugh! - ugh! ugh! ugh! - ugh! ugh! ugh!" My poor friend found it impossible to reply for many minutes. "It is nothing," he said, at last. "Come," I said, with decision, "we will go back; your health is precious. You are rich, respected, admired, beloved; you are happy, as once I was. You are a man to be missed. For me it is no matter. We will go back; you will be ill, and I cannot be responsible. Besides, there is Luchesi - " "Enough," he said; "the cough is a mere nothing; it will not kill me. I shall not die of a cough." "True - true, ~ Edgar Allan Poe

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no craven, Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the Nightly shore - Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!" Quoth the raven, "Nevermore. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Detective fiction could not have existed without Edgar Allan Poe. ~ Giles Foden

In the strange anomaly of my existence, feelings with me had never been of the heart, and my passions always were of the mind. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

FAIR river! in thy bright, clear flow Of crystal, wandering water, Thou art an emblem of the glow Of beauty - the unhidden heart - The playful maziness of art In old Alberto's daughter; But when within thy wave she looks - Which glistens then, and trembles - Why, then, the prettiest of brooks Her worshipper resembles; For in his heart, as in thy stream, Her image deeply lies - His heart which trembles at the beam Of her soul-searching eyes. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

-ev'n with us the breath Of Science dims the mirror of our joy ... ~ Edgar Allan Poe

If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

She was a maiden of rarest beauty, and not more lovely than full of glee. And evil was the hour when she saw, and loved, and wedded the painter. He, passionate, studious, austere, and having already a bride in his Art; she a maiden of rarest beauty, and not more lovely than full of glee; all light and smiles, and frolicsome as the young fawn; loving and cherishing all things; hating only the Art which was her rival; ~ Edgar Allan Poe

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

But the memory of past sorrow
is it not present joy? ~ Edgar Allan Poe

The rays of the moon seemed to search the very bottom of the profound gulf; but still I could make out nothing distinctly, on account of a thick mist in which everything there was enveloped, and over which there hung a magnificent rainbow, like that narrow and tottering bridge which Musselmen say is the only pathway between Time and Eternity. This mist, or spray, was no doubt occasioned by the clashing of the great walls of the funnel, as they all met together at the bottom-but the yell that went up to the Heavens from out of that mist, I dare not attempt to describe. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

I briefly considered doing Edgar Allan Poe and just swearing a lot. ~ Andy Richter

If you have never been at sea in a heavy gale, you can form no idea of the confusion of mind occasioned by wind and spry together. They blind, deafen, and strangle you, and take away all power of action or reflection. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

No one should brave the underworld alone. ~ Poe

My favorite poem ever was 'Annabel Lee' by Edgar Allan Poe. ~ Ross Lynch

It was all Mrs. Waddington could do to refrain from hurling a bust of Edgar Allan Poe at her head. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

At length for my seared and writhing body there was no longer an inch of foothold on the firm floor of the prison. I struggled no more, but the agony of my soul found vent in one loud, long, and final scream of despair. I felt that I tottered upon the brink
I averted my eyes
~ Edgar Allan Poe

In death - no! even in the grave all is not lost. Else there is no immortality for man. Arousing from the most profound slumbers, we break the gossamer web of some dream. Yet in a second afterward, (so frail may that web have been) we remember not that we have dreamed. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Arms are around me, hands in my hair, lips moving across my cheek, over my neck, and I'm thinking about poetry, about Edgar Allan Poe and words that move like waves, people who move like waves together, and all the non-words we can make with our bodies. ~ Julie Cross

And the riven quote, nevermore. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

For eyes we have no models in the remotely antique. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

And so, all the night-tide, I lay down the side, of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride, in the sepulchre there by the sea, in her tomb by the surrounding sea. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

There are some qualities, some incorporate things, that have a double life, which thus is made. A type os twin entity which springs from matter and light, envinced in solid and shade. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

And all I loved, I loved alone. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe, an earlier UVA student, once complained in a letter that his stepfather spoke to him as if Poe were one of the black slaves; some of the students at UVA surely felt the same about being told what to do by faculty. ~ Matthew Pearl

If we examine a work of ordinary art, by means of a powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature will disappear - but the closest scrutiny of the photogenic drawing discloses only a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

It is more than probable that I am not understood; but I fear, indeed, that it is in no manner possible to convey to the mind of the merely general reader, an adequate idea of that nervous intensity of interest with which, in my case, the powers of meditation (not to speak technically) busied and buried themselves, in the contemplation of even the most ordinary objects of the universe. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

The past is a pebble in my shoe. ~ Poe

I never can hear a crowd of people singing and gesticulating, all together, at an Italian opera, without fancying myself at Athens, listening to that particular tragedy, by Sophocles, in which he introduces a full chorus of turkeys, who set about bewailing the death of Meleager. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Books, indeed, were his sole luxuries ~ Edgar Allan Poe