“I could have clasped the red walls to my bosom as a garment of eternal peace. "Death," I said, "any death but that of the pit!" Fool! might I have not known that into the pit it was the object of the burning iron to urge me?”

“I have great faith in fools - self-confidence my friends will call it.”

“Not altogether a fool," said G., "but then he's a poet, which I take to be only one remove from a fool.""True," said Dupin, after a long and thoughtful whiff from his meerschaum, "although I have been guilty of certain doggerel myself.”

“Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis.”

“To be thoroughly conversant with Man’s heart, is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of Despair”

“To conceive the horror of my sensations is, I presume, utterly impossible; yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death.”

“From childhood's hour I have not been. As others were, I have not seen. As others saw, I could not awaken. My heart to joy at the same tone. And all I loved, I loved alone.”