Once upon a midnight dreary

A short story is "a short prose narrative, requiring from a half hour, to one or two hours in its perusal...having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out.

Invisible things are the only realities.

We gave the Future to the winds, and slumbered tranquilly in the Present, weaving the dull world around us into dreams.

The true genius shudders at incompleteness - and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.

There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart - an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime

To see distinctly the machinery--the wheels and pinions--of any work of Art is, unquestionably, of itself, a pleasure, but one which we are able to enjoy only just in proportion as we do not enjoy the legitimate effect designed by the artist.