Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made.

And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

In efforts to soar above our nature, we invariably fall below it.

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.

I was cautious in what I said before the young lady; for I could not be sure that she was sane; and, in fact, there was a certain restless brilliancy about her eyes that half led me to imagine she was not.

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