Best Sayings And Quotes From Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein'
Dive into Mary Shelley's masterpiece with our 50 quotes from her classic novel.
It's by no fault of Mary Shelley's that the only quote we all seem to remember from her classic 1818 text Frankenstein is, "It's alive!" The timeless horror story she penned of a man-made monster racked with conflicting emotions of his own making has reached icon status over the past 200 years—and yet, so many of the book's other poignant lamentations about life, grief, and loneliness get lost in the shuffle.
And there are a lot of them. In fact, people tend to forget what Frankenstein—the book—was really about and instead just fast-forward to the bolts-in-the-neck part. Remember: Dr. Frankenstein, the creator, was the real monster, and his selfish obsession ultimately led to his demise.
Need a refresher? No problem. With spooky season in full throttle, let's pay homage to one of the greatest scary stories of all time with 50 Frankenstein quotes from Shelley's original text.
50 Frankenstein Quotes
1. "I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous."
2. "The fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone."
3. "There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand."
4. "Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful."
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5. "When falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness?"
6. "Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it."
7. "I could not understand why men who knew all about good and evil could hate and kill each other."
8. "I am malicious because I am miserable."
9. "I am alone and miserable. Only someone as ugly as I am could love me."
10. "'Hateful day when I received life!' I exclaimed in agony. 'Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance. Satan had his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and abhorred.'"
11. "Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change."
12. "We are fashioned creatures, but half made up."
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13. "He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance."
14. "If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind."
15. "What can stop the determined heart and resolved will of man?"
16. "I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me, whose eyes would reply to mine."
17. "Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to a mind when it has once seized on it like a lichen on a rock."
18. "My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy, and when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change without torture such as you cannot even imagine."
19. "The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature."
20. "Why did I not die? More miserable than man ever was before, why did I not sink into forgetfulness and rest? Death snatches away many blooming children, the only hopes of their doting parents: how many brides and youthful lovers have been one day in the bloom of health and hope, and the next a prey for worms and the decay of the tomb! Of what materials was I made, that I could thus resist so many shocks, which, like the turning of the wheel, continually renewed the torture? But I was doomed to live."
21. "I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel..."
22. "Listen to me, Frankenstein. You accuse me of murder; and yet you would, with a satisfied conscience, destroy your own creature. Oh, praise the eternal justice of man!"
23. "For a moment my soul was elevated from its debasing and miserable fears to which these sights were the monuments and the remembrances."
24. "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."
25. "Heavy misfortunes have befallen us, but let us only cling closer to what remains, and transfer our love for those whom we have lost to those who yet live."
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26. "I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other."
27. "I feel exquisite pleasure in dwelling on the recollections of childhood, before misfortune had tainted my mind, and changed its bright visions of extensive usefulness into gloomy and narrow reflections upon self."
28. "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."
29. "It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another."
30. "But soon, I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct."
31. "I felt emotions of gentleness and pleasure, that had long appeared dead, revive within me. Half surprised by the novelty of these sensations, I allowed myself to be borne away by them, and forgetting my solitude and deformity, dared to be happy."
32. "Farewell! I leave you, and in you the last of humankind whom these eyes will ever behold. Farewell, Frankenstein! If thou wert yet alive and yet cherished a desire of revenge against me, it would be better satiated in my life than in my destruction. But it was not so; thou didst seek my extinction, that I might not cause greater wretchedness; and if yet, in some mode unknown to me, thou hadst not ceased to think and feel, thou wouldst not desire against me a vengeance greater than that which I feel. Blasted as thou wert, my agony was still superior to thine, for the bitter sting of remorse will not cease to rankle in my wounds until death shall close them forever."
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33. "You may deem me romantic, dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend."
34. "The companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain."
35. "How sweet is the affection of others to such a wretch as I am!"
36. "I believed myself totally unfitted for the company of strangers."
37. "How mutable are our feelings, and how strange is that clinging love we have of life even in the excess of misery!"
38. "The natural phenomena that take place every day before our eyes did not escape my examinations."
39. "Alas! I regret that I am taken from you; and, happy and beloved as I have been, is it not hard to quit you all? But these are not thoughts befitting me; I will endeavor to resign myself cheerfully to death, and will indulge a hope of meeting you in another world."
40. "It may...be judged indecent in me to come forward on this occasion; but when I see a fellow-creature about to perish through the cowardice of her pretended friends, I wish to be allowed to speak, that I may say what I know of her character."
41. "I do not ever remember to have trembled at a tale of superstition, or to have feared the apparition of a spirit. Darkness had no effect upon my fancy; and a churchyard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm."
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42. "Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay?"
43. "Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room, and continued a long time traversing my bed-chamber, unable to compose my mind to sleep."
44. "Alas! I had turned loose into the world a depraved wretch, whose delight was in carnage and misery; had he not murdered my brother?"
45. "After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter."
46. "Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world."
47. "To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death."
48. "Nothing contributes so much to tranquillize the mind as a steady purpose- a point on which the soul can focus its intellectual eye."
49. "'Man,'" I cried, "'how ignorant art thou in thy pride of wisdom!'"
50. "Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be his world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow."
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