Bram Stoker
Irish-born Abraham Stoker, known as Bram, of Britain wrote the gothic horror novel
Dracula
(1897).
The feminist Charlotte Mathilda Blake Thornely Stoker at 15 Marino crescent, then as now called "the crescent," in Fairview, a coastal suburb of Dublin, Ireland, bore this third of seven children. The parents, members of church of Ireland, attended the parish church of Saint John the Baptist, located on Seafield road west in Clontarf with their baptized children.
Stoker, an invalid, started school at the age of seven years in 1854, when he made a complete and astounding recovery. Of this time, Stoker wrote, "I was naturally thoughtful, and the leisure of long illness gave opportunity for many thoughts which were fruitful according to their kind in later years."
After his recovery, he, a normal young man, even excelled as a university athlete at Trinity college, Dublin form 1864 to 1870 and graduated with honors in mathematics. He served as auditor of the college historical society and as president of the university philosophical society with his first paper on "Sensationalism in Fiction and Society."
In 1876, while employed as a civil servant in Dublin, Stoker wrote a non-fiction book (The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland, published 1879) and theatre reviews for The Dublin Mail, a newspaper partly owned by fellow horror writer J. Sheridan Le Fanu. His interest in theatre led to a lifelong friendship with the English actor Henry Irving. He also wrote stories, and in 1872 "The Crystal Cup" was published by the London Society, followed by "The Chain of Destiny" in four parts in The Shamrock.
In 1878 Stoker married Florence Balcombe, a celebrated beauty whose former suitor was Oscar Wilde. The couple moved to London, where Stoker became business manager (at first as acting-manager) of Irving's Lyceum Theatre, a post he held for 27 years. The collaboration with Irving was very important for Stoker and through him he became involved in London's high society, where he met, among other notables, James McNeil Whistler, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In the course of Irving's tours, Stoker got the chance to travel around the world.
The Stokers had one son, Irving Noel, who was born on December 31, 1879.
People cremated the body of Bram Stoker and placed his ashes placed in a display urn at Golders green crematorium. After death of Irving Noel Stoker in 1961, people added his ashes to that urn. Despite the original plan to keep ashes of his parents together, after death, people scattered ashes of Florence Stoker at the gardens of rest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Stoker
“Though sympathy alone can't alter facts, it can help to make them more bearable.”
“No man knows till he experiences it, what it is like to feel his own life-blood drawn away into the woman he loves.”
“I asked Dr. Seward to give me a little opiate of some kind, as I had not slept well the night before......I hope I have not done wrong, for as sleep begins to flirt with me, a new fear comes: that I may have been foolish in thus depriving myself of the power of waking. I might want it. Here comes sleep. Goodnight.”
“Being proposed to all is very nice and all that sort of thing, but it isn’t at all a happy thing when you have to see a poor fellow, whom you know loves you honestly, going away and looking all broken-hearted, and to know that, no matter what he may say at the moment, you are passing quite out if his life”
“I will not let you go into the unknown alone.”
“Sleep has no place it can call its own.”
“I have always thought that a wild animal never looks so well as when some obstacle of pronounced durability is between us. A personal experience has intensified rather than diminished that idea.”
“I pray you, be seated and sup how you please. You will I trust, excuse me that I do not join you, but I have dined already, and I do not sup.”
“The blood is the life!”
“The tomb in the daytime, and when wreathed with fresh flowers, had looked grim and gruesome enough; but now some days afterwards, when the flowers hung lank and dead, their whites turning to rust and their greens to browns; when the spider and the beetle had resumed their accustomed dominance; when time-discoloured stone, and dust-encrusted mortar, and rusty, dank iron, and tarnished brass and clouded silver-plating gave back the feeble glimmer of a candle, the effect was more miserable and sordid than could have been imagined. It conveyed irresistibly the idea that life - animal life - was not the only thing that could pass away.”
“No one but a woman can help a man when he is in trouble of the heart.”
“I suppose that we women are such cowards that we think a man will save us from fears, and we marry him.”
“Euthanasia" is an excellent and comforting word! I am grateful to whoever invented it.”
“He bowed in a courtly way as he replied: "I am Dracula. and I bid you welcome, Mr Harker, to my house. Come in; the night air is chill, and you must need to eat and rest.”
“The attendant thinks it is some form of religious mania which has seized him. If so, we must look for squalls, for a strong man with homicidal and religious mania at once might be dangerous. The combination is a dreadful one.”
“..the world seems full of good men--even if there are monsters in it.”
“I do not, as you know, take sufficient interest in dress to be able to describe the new fashions. Dress is a bore.”
“There is a reason why all things are as they are.”
“The blood is life... and it shall be mine!”
“Never did tombs look so ghastly white. Never did cypress, or yew, or juniper so seem the embodiment of funeral gloom. Never did tree or grass wave or rustle so ominously. Never did bough creak so mysteriously, and never did the far-away howling of dogs send such a woeful presage through the night.”
“Oh, my dear, if you only knew how strange is the matter regarding which I am here, it is you who would laugh. I have learned not to think little of any one's belief, no matter how strange it may be. I have tried to keep an open mind, and it is not the ordinary things of life that could close it, but the strange things, the extraordinary things, the things that make one doubt if they be mad or sane.”
“Denn die Todten reiten Schnell. (For the dead travel fast.)”
“Once again...welcome to my house. Come freely. Go safely; and leave something of the happiness you bring.”
“For now, feeling as though my own brain were unhinged or as if the shock had come which must end in its undoing, I turn to my diary for repose. The habit of entering accurately must help sooth me.”
“She had been to a tea-party with an antediluvian monster, and that they had been waited on by up-to-date men-servants.”
“Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!”
“Doctor, you don't know what it is to doubt everything, even yourself. No, you don't; you couldn't with eyebrows like yours.”
“And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere 'modernity' cannot kill.”
“La desazón es un instinto y un modo de advertencia.”
“Yo soy Drácula. Le doy la bienvenida, señor Harker, a mi casa.”
“Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.”
“There are mysteries which men can only guess at, which age by age they may solve only in part.”
“Good women tell all their lives, and by day and by hour and by minute, such things that angels can read. ”
“This man belongs to me, I want him!”
“We learn from failure, not from success!”
“Oh, the terrible struggle that I have had against sleep so often of late; the pain of the sleeplessness, or the pain of the fear of sleep, and with such unknown horror as it has for me! How blessed are some people, whose lives have no fears, no dreads; to whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly, and brings nothing but sweet dreams.”
“Despair has its own calms.”