Quotes from Edgar Allan Poe

The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.

Yet mad I am not...and very surely do I not dream.

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December;And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.

It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors and looking them piteously in the eyes—die with despair of heart and convulsion of throat, on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed.

Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence– whether much that is glorious– whether all that is profound– does not spring from disease of thought– from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.

"Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore—Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!"Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary.

The Imp of the Perverse.

Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.

I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.

With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence: they must not—they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind.

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 past is a pebble in my shoe.

From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,Out of Space—out of Time.

The ninety and nine are with dreams, content but the hope of the world made new, is the hundredth man who is grimly bent on making those dreams come true.

Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her,And tempted her out of her gloom.

The happiest day—the happiest hourMy sear'd and blighted heart hath known,The highest hope of pride and power,I feel hath flown.

And neither the angels in Heaven aboveNor the demons down under the sea,Can ever dissever my soul from the soulOf the beautiful Annabel Lee.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

Thou wast that all to me, love,For which my soul did pine—A green isle in the sea, love,A fountain and a shrine,All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers,And all the flowers were mine.

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.

The silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain.

"Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!"Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."