For a moment my soul was elevated from its debasing and miserable fears to which these sights were the monuments and the remembrances. For an instant I dared to shake off my chains, and look around me with a free and lofty spirit; but the iron had eaten into my flesh, and I sank again, trembling and hopeless, into my miserable self.
Mary Wollstonecraft ShelleyThe world to me was a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own.
Mary Wollstonecraft ShelleyWhat are we, the inhabitants of this globe, least among the many that people infinite space? Our minds embrace infinity; the visible mechanism of our being is subject to merest accident.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley