Edgar Allan Poe

A novelist, for example, need have no care of his moral. It is there -- that is to say, it is somewhere -- and the moral and the critics can take care of themselves.

It was night, and the rain fell; and falling, it was rain, but, having fallen, it was blood.

Whether people grow fat by joking, or whether there is something in fat itself which predisposes to a joke, I have never been quite able to determine...

We should bear in mind that, in general, it is the object of our newspapers rather to create a sensation - to make a point - than to further the cause of truth.

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.

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

I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow.

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 boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

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

In one case out of a hundred a point is excessively discussed because it is obscure; in the ninety-nine remaining it is obscure because it is excessively discussed.

That which you mistake for madness is but an overacuteness of the senses.

Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action for no other reason than because he knows he should not?

Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?

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

In the deepest slumber-no! In delirium-no! In a swoon-no! In death-no! even in the grave all is not lost.

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

True! - nervous - very, very nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute.

And so being young and dipt in folly / I fell in love with melancholy.

Nemo me impune lacessit.