Mary Shelley

The whole series of my life appeared to me as a dream; I sometimes doubted if indeed it were all true, for it never presented itself to my mind with the force of reality.

I wish that women would have power not over men, but over themselves.

What is there in our nature that is forever urging us on towards pain and misery?

I must love and be loved. I must feel that my dear and chosen friends are happier through me.

What is the world, except that which we feel? Love, and hope, and delight, or sorrow and tears; these are our lives, our realities, to which we give the names of power, possession, misfortune, and death.

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

I am not a person of opinions because I feel the counter arguments too strongly.

The beginning is always today.

The companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain.

One man's life or death were but a small price to pay for the acquirement of the knowledge which I sought, for the dominion I should acquire and transmit over the elemental foes of our race.

You are my creator, but I am your master.

Let us live for each other and for happiness; let us seek peace in our dear home, near the inland murmur of streams, and the gracious waving of trees, the beauteous vesture of earth, and sublime pageantry of the skies. Let us leave 'life,' that we may live.

We are not formed for enjoyment; and, however we may be attuned to the reception of pleasurable emotion, disappointment is the never-failing pilot of our life's bark, and ruthlessly carries us on to the shoals.

I felt convinced that however it might have been in former times, in the present stage of the world, no man's faculties could be developed, no man's moral principle be enlarged and liberal, without an extensive acquaintance with books.

Did God create man, merely in the end to become dead earth in the midst of healthful vegetating nature?

What are we, the inhabitants of this globe, least among the many that people infinite space? Our minds embrace infinity; the visible mechanism of our being is subject to merest accident.

Marriage is usually considered the grave, and not the cradle of love.

Truly disappointment is the guardian deity of human life; she sits at the threshold of unborn time, and marshals the events as they come forth.

Oh! grief is fantastic; it weaves a web on which to trace the history of its woe from every form and change around; it incorporates itself with all living nature; it finds sustenance in every object; as light, it fills all things, and, like light, it gives its own colors to all.

This, I thought, is power! Not to be strong of limb, hard of heart, ferocious, and daring; but kind, compassionate and soft.