Quotes from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

My courage and my resolution is firm; but my hopes fluctuate, and my spirits are often depressed.

The time at length arrives when grief is rather an indulgence than a necessity

required kindness and sympathy; but I did not believe myself utterly unworthy of it.

My heart, which was before sorrowful, now swelled with something like joy;

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.

I am required not only to raise the spirits of others, but sometimes to sustain my own, when theirs are failing.

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

The labours I endured were no longer to be alleviated by the bright sun or gentle breezes of spring; all joy was but a mockery, which insulted my desolate state, and made me feel more painfully that I was not made for the enjoyment of pleasure.

the survivors are the greatest sufferers, and for them time is the only consolation. Those maxims of the Stoics, that death was no evil, and that the mind of man ought to be superior to despair on the eternal absence of a beloved object, ought not to be urged. Even Cato wept over the dead body of his brother.

I am alone – quite alone – in the world – the blight of misfortune has passed over me and withered me; I know that I am about to die and I feel happy – joyous.

I shall die. I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me, or be the prey of feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched. He is dead who called me into being; and when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish. I shall no longer see the sun or stars, or feel the winds play on my cheeks. Light, feeling, and sense, will pass away; and in this condition must I find my happiness.

I dared not advance, dreading a thousand nameless evils that made me tremble, although I was unable to define them.

He appeared to despise himself for being the slave of passion.

I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me; whose eyes would reply to mine. You may deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend.

What is there in our nature that is for ever urging us on towards pain and misery? We are not formed for enjoyment; and, however we may be attuned to the reception of pleasureable emotion, disappointment is the never-failing pilot of our life's bark, and ruthlessly carries us on to the shoals.

At first I started back, unable to believe that it was indeed I who was reflected in the mirror; and when I became fully convinced that I was in reality the monster that I am, I was filled with the bitterest sensations of despondence and mortification.

But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am quite alone.

But I am not so wretched as you are

Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned?

partly as an expedient for exercising any untried resources of mind.

By fearing the stranger, by abusing the vulnerable and the outcast, society creates its own monsters.

I love you very tenderly. Remember me with affection, should you never hear from me again.

I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true, but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling.

whom we saw every day, and whose very existence appeared a part of our own, can have departed forever—that the brightness of a beloved eye can have been extinguished, and the sound of a voice so familiar and dear to the ear can be hushed, never more to be heard.