“True! - nervous - very, very nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?”

“True, nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am, but why will say that I am mad?! The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute.”

“TRUE! – nervous – very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses – not destroyed – not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily – how calmly I can tell you the whole story.”

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

“It is more than probable that I am not understood; but I fear, indeed, that it is in no manner possible to convey to the mind of the merely general reader, an adequate idea of that nervous intensity of interest with which, in my case, the powers of meditation (not to speak technically) busied and buried themselves, in the contemplation of even the most ordinary objects of the universe.”

“I went as a passenger, having no other inducement than a kind of nervous restlessness which haunted me as a fiend”

“I heed not that my earthly lot Hath - little of Earth in it -That years of love have been forgot In the hatred of a minute: -I mourn not that the desolate Are happier, sweet, than I,But that you sorrow for my fate Who am a passer by.”