Today I’m continuing with the Blogging from A-Z Challenge! I’ll be posting every day except Sundays throughout April. This year, my readers voted for the theme “My Favourite Book Quotes”. So I’ve collected together the quotations that move me, inspire me and make me smile. I hope you enjoy them!
For letter G, I decided to group together some of my favourite quotes from gothic literature. I fell in love with the genre during my 6th form and university days, during which I discovered works such as Frankenstein, The Turn of the Screw, Great Expectations and The Picture of Dorian Gray. I am not a huge fan of the “classics”, but the supernatural elements and philosophical themes in gothic literature strongly appeal to me.
My Favourite Quotes from Gothic Literature
“I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.”
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
“Of course I was under the spell, and the wonderful part is that, even at the time, I perfectly knew I was. But I gave myself up to it; it was an antidote to any pain, and I had more pains than one.”
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
“I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror. It was not a groan of pain or of grief –oh, no! –it was the low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul when overcharged with awe. I knew the sound well. Many a night, just at midnight, when all the world slept, it has welled up from my own bosom, deepening, with its dreadful echo, the terrors that distracted me. I say I knew it well. I knew what the old man felt, and pitied him, although I chuckled at heart.”
“If you still think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body.”
Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart
“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”
“I would always rather be happy than dignified.”
“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
“I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.”
“Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but – I hope – into a better shape.”
“In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice.”
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
“Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.”
“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.”
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Do you enjoy gothic literature? Let me know in the comments!
Great quotes — especially the ones from Dorian Gray 🙂
Ronel visiting for the A-Z Challenge My Languishing TBR: G
I love that book. So witty.
The Tell-Tale Heart is actually a masterpiece of effective writing, and of course Oscar Wilde is the absolute king of quotable quotes.
G is for Glowing
I agree!