Quotes from Mary Shelley

Thus not the tenderness of friendship, nor the beauty of earth, nor of heaven, could redeem my soul from woe; the very accents of love were ineffectual. I was encompassed by a cloud which no beneficial influence could penetrate. The wounded deer dragging its fainting limbs to some untrodden brake, there to gaze upon the arrow which had pierced it, and to die, was but a type of me.

I was like the Arabian who had been buried with the dead, and found a passage to life aided only by one glimmering, and seemingly ineffectual, light. I

these were men whose indefatigable zeal modern philosophers were indebted for most of the foundations of their knowledge. They had left to us, as an easier task, to give new names, and arrange in connected classifications, the facts which they in a great degree had been the instruments of bringing to light. The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind.

shore of the lake, at the distance of rather more than a league

His countenance instantly assumed an aspect of the deepest gloom, and he replied, To seek one who fled from me.

We rest; a dream has power to poison sleep.      We rise; one wand'ring thought pollutes the day. We feel, conceive, or reason; laugh or weep,      Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away; It is the same: for, be it joy or sorrow,      The path of its departure still is free. Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;      Nought may endure but mutability!

It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils.

new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve their's.

pursued nature to her hiding-places. Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay?

Yet could England indeed doff her lordly trappings, and be content with the democratic style of America? Were the pride of ancestry, the patrician spirit, the gentle courtesies and refined pursuits, splendid attributes of rank, to be erased among us? We were told that this would not be the case; that we were by nature a poetical people, a nation easily duped by words, ready to array clouds in splendour, and bestow honour on the dust.

Cómo puede el hombre alardear de una sensibilidad superior a las de las bestias? Si nuestros impulsos fueran sólo los del hambre y la sed, los del deseo, estaríamos muy cerca de la libertad.

Before you sign my death-warrant, be sure that you are yourself safe.

In the midst of poverty and want, Felix carried with pleasure to his sister the first little white flower that peeped out from beneath the snowy ground.

I had gazed on him while unfinished; he was ugly then; but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived. I

Why, that requires not this preparation; ye need not have come thus far and dragged your captain to the shame of a defeat merely to prove yourselves cowards.

I imagined that I also might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are consecrated.

The possessions most esteemed by your fellow-creatures were high and unsullied descent united with riches. A man might be respected with only one of these advantages; but, without either, he was considered, except in very rare instances, as a vagabond and a slave, doomed to waste his powers for the profits of the chosen few!

La invención consiste en la capacidad para captar las posibilidades de un objeto y en el poder para moldear y revestir las ideas que sugiere.

I have thus endeavoured to preserve the truth of the elementary principles of human

pero yo no era dueño, sino esclavo, de unas pasiones que me horrorizaban y a la vez no podía resistir.

Me encantaba investigar lo que ocurría en el mundo... ella prefería ocuparse en perseguir las etéreas creaciones de los poetas. El mundo era para mí un secreto que deseaba desvelar... para ella era un espacio que deseaba poblar con sus propias imaginaciones.

My vices are the children of a forced solitude that I abhor, and my virtues will necessarily arise when I live in communion with an equal.

En lo que me fue posible, oculté en lo más profundo del corazón la ansiedad que me consumía y acepté con aparente sinceridad todo lo que proponía mi padre, aunque todo aquello no podía servir sino como decorado de mi tragedia.

Their melancholy is soothing, and their joy elevating, to a degree I never experienced in studying the authors of any other country. When you read ther writings, life appears to consist in a warm sun and a garden of roses, in the smiles and frowns of a fair enemy, and the fire that consumes your own heart. How different from the manly and heroical poetry of Greece and Rome!