Edgar Allan Poe

"I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched."

"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."

"Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it 'the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.' The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of 'Artist.'"

"The idea of God, infinity, or spirit stands for the possible attempt at an impossible conception."

"There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man."

"A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it."

"I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active - not more happy - nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago."

"We loved with a love that was more than love."

"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."

"All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry."

"I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom."

"The idea of God, infinity, or spirit stands for the possible attempt at an impossible conception."

"To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary."

"The best things in life make you sweaty."

"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."

"The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world."

"The best things in life make you sweaty."

"There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion."

"I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity."

"We loved with a love that was more than love."