Mary Shelley

How dreadful it is, to emerge from the oblivion of slumber, and to receive as a good morrow the mute wailing of one's own hapless heart - to return from the land of deceptive dreams to the heavy knowledge of unchanged disaster!

It would be an endless task to trace the variety of meannesses, cares, and sorrows into which women are plunged by the prevailing opinion that they were created rather to feel than reason.

I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on.

If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear!

A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind, and never to allow passion or transitory desire to disturb his tranquillity. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule. If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind.

When I looked around I saw and heard of none like me. Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned? I cannot describe to you the agony that these reflections inflicted upon me: I tried to dispel them, but sorrow only increased with knowledge.

Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.

I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I again shall be virtuous.

Nothing is more painful to the human mind than after the feelings have been worked up by a quick succession of events, the dead calmness of inaction and certainty which follows and deprives the soul both of hope and fear.

Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.

A truce to philosophy! —Life is before me, and I rush into possession. Hope, glory, love, and blameless ambition are my guides, and my soul knows no dread.

Solitude was my only consolation - deep, dark, deathlike solitude.

I could not understand why men who knew all about good and evil could hate and kill each other.

My dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed - my dearest pleasure when free.

The fallen angel becomes a malignant devil.

It is hardly surprising that women concentrate on the way they look instead of what is in their minds since not much has been put in their minds to begin with.

It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.

Thus strangely are our souls constructed, and by slight ligaments are we bound to prosperity and ruin.

No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.