How mutable are our feelings, and how strange is that clinging love we have of life even in the excess of misery!

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.

One as deformed and horrible as myself, could not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species, and have the same defects... with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being.

Oh! grief is fantastic; it weaves a web on which to trace the history of its woe from every form and change around; it incorporates itself with all living nature; it finds sustenance in every object; as light, it fills all things, and, like light, it gives its own colors to all.

The 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.

Satan has his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and detested.

The fallen angel becomes a malignant devil.