Top 50 Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “What a fool I was! and yet, in the sight of angels, are we any wiser as we grow older? It seems to me, only, that our illusions change as we go on; but, still, we are madmen all the same.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

2. “But to die as lovers may – to die together, so that they may live together.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

3. “I have been in love with no one, and never shall,” she whispered, “unless it should be with you.” How.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

4. “If your dear heart is wounded, my wild heart bleeds with yours.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

5. “You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me and still come with me, and hating me through death and after. There is no such word as indifference in my apathetic nature.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

6. “In Styria, we, though by no means magnificent people, inhabit a castle, or schloss.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

7. “The air was still. The silvery vapour hung serenely on the far horizon, and the frosty stars blinked brightly. Everyone knows the effect of such a scene on a mind already saddened. Fancies and regrets float mistily in the dream, and the scene affects us with a strange mixture of memory and anticipation, like some sweet old air heard in the distance.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

8. “You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish. How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me and still come with me and hating me through death and after.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

9. “Knowledge is power-and power of one sort or another is the secret lust of human souls; and here is, beside the sense of exploration, the undefinable interest of a story, and above all, something forbidden, to stimulate the contumacious appetite.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

10. “Young people like, and even love, on impulse.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

11. “I remember everything about it – with an effort. I see it all, as divers see what is going on above them, through a medium, dense, rippling, but transparent.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

12. “Nevertheless, life and death are mysterious states, and we know little of the resources of either.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

13. “But dreams come through stone walls, light up dark rooms, or darken light ones, and their persons make their exits and their entrances as they please, and laugh at locksmiths.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

14. “Girls are caterpillars while they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime there are grubs and larvae, don’t you see – each with their peculiar propensities, necessities and structure.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

15. “Darling, darling. I live in you, and you would die for me. I love you so.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

16. “It was long before the terror of recent events subsided; and to this hour the image of Carmilla returns to memory with ambiguous alternations – sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church; and often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing room door.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

17. “You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one for ever.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

18. “I can not help it; as I draw near to you, you, in your turn will draw near to others, and learn the rapture of that cruelty, which yet is love; so, for a while, seek to know no more of me and mine, but trust me with all your loving spirit.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

19. “In the rapture of my enormous humiliation I live in your warm life, and you shall die – die sweetly die – into mine.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

20. “Although I felt very weak, I did not feel ill; and strength, one always fancies, is a thing that may be picked up when we please.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

21. “How marvellously lie our anxieties, in filmy layers, one over the other! Take away that which has lain on the upper surface for so long – the care of cares – the only one, as it seemed to you, between your soul and the radiance of Heaven – and straight you find a new stratum there.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

22. “There is no dealing with great sorrow as if it were under the control of our wills. It is a terrible phenomenon, whose laws we must study, and to whose conditions we must submit, if we would mitigate it.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

23. “We are in God’s hands: nothing can happen without his permission, and all will end well for those who love him. He is our faithful creator; He has made us all, and will take care of us.” “Creator! Nature!“ said the young lady in answer to my gentle father. “And this disease that invades the country is natural. Nature. All things proceed from Nature – don’t they? All things in the heaven, in the earth, and under the earth, act and live as Nature ordains? I think so.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

24. “Old persons are sometimes as unwilling to die as tired-out children are to say good night and go to bed.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

25. “There is no such sense of solitude as that which we experience upon the silent and vast elevations of great mountains. Lifted high above the level of human sounds and habitations, among the wild expanses and colossal features of Nature, we are thrilled in our loneliness with a strange fear and elation – an ascent above the reach of life’s expectations or companionship, and the tremblings of a wild and undefined misgivings.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

26. “I was not frightened, for I was one of those happy children who are studiously kept in ignorance of ghost stories, of fairy tales, and of all such lore as makes us cover up our heads when the door creeks suddenly, or the flicker of an expiring candle makes the shadow of a bed-post dance upon the wall, nearer to our faces.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

27. “It was now the stormy equinoctial weather that sounds the wild dirge of autumn, and marches the winter in. I love, and always did, that grand undefinable music, threatening and bewailing, with its strange soul of liberty and desolation.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

28. “The nearest inhabited village is about seven of your English miles to the left.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

29. “The precautions of nervous people re infectious, and persons of a like temperament are pretty sure, after a time, to imitate them.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

30. “For some nights I slept profoundly; but still every morning I felt the same lassitude, and a languor weighed upon me all day. I felt myself a changed girl. A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was slowly sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome possession of me. If it was sad, the tone of mind which this induced was also sweet. Whatever it might be, my soul acquiesced in it.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

31. “Those hours of opium happiness which the Doctor and I spent together in secret were regulated with a scientific accuracy. We did not blindly smoke the drug of paradise, and leave our dreams to chance. While smoking, we carefully steered our conversation through the brightest and calmest channels of thought.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

32. “It stands on a slight eminence.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

33. “There was a coldness, it seemed to me, beyond her years, in her smiling melancholy persistent refusal to afford me the least ray of light.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

34. “You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me, and still come with me.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

35. “The gloom was increased by several grand old trees.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

36. “The mind is a different organ by night and by day.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

37. “No one likes a straight road but the man who pays for it, or who, when he travels, is brute enough to wish to get to his journey’s end.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

38. “Berthe was wonderfully well educated for a Frenchwoman of that period, and surprisingly handsome for a Frenchwoman of any.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

39. “There was a coldness, it seemed to me, beyond her years, in her smiling melancholy persistent refusal to afford me the least ray of light. I cannot say we quarreled upon this point, for she would not quarrel upon any. It was, of course, very unfair of me to press her, very ill-bred, but I really could not help it; and I might just as well have let it alone. What she did tell me amounted, in my unconscionable estimation – to nothing.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

40. “I did not know till now how irresolute a character was mine.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

41. “I believe the entire natural world is but the ultimate expression of that spiritual world from which, and in which alone, it has its life.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

42. “I am afraid we women are factionists; we always take a side, and nature has formed us for advocates rather than judges.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

43. “Places change imperceptibly – in detail, at least – a good deal,′ said the Doctor, making an effort to keep up a conversation that plainly would not go on itself; ‘and people too; population shifts – there’s an old fellow, sir, they call Death.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

44. “Have not women preferred hatred to indifference, and the reputation of witchcraft, with all its penalties, to absolute insignificance?”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

45. “There comes with old age a time when the heart is no longer fusible or malleable, and must retain the form in which it has cooled down.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

46. “How marvellously lie our anxieties, in filmy layers, one over the other! Take away that which has lain on the upper surface for so long – the care of cares – the only one, as it seemed to you, between your soul and the radiance of Heaven – and straight you find a new stratum there. As physical science tells us no fluid is without its skin, so does it seem with this fine medium of the soul, and these successive films of care that form upon its surface on mere contact with the upper air and light.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

47. “Boating, my dear Mrs. Bedel, is the dullest of all things; don’t you think so? Because a boat looks very pretty from the shore, we fancy that the shore must look very pretty from a boat; and when we try it, we find we have only got down into a pit and can see nothing rightly. For my part, I hate boating and I hate the water...”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

48. “D’Avray, her father, and I had met before in Algeria. He was dying now. He left the child on his death-bed to me.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

49. “The Squire came to the side of the bed, and put his arms under Dickon, and lifted the boy – in a dead sleep all the time – and carried him out so, at the door.”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

50. “At another time, or in another case, it might have excited my ridicule. But into what quackeries will not people rush for a last chance, where all accustomed means have failed, and the life of a beloved object is at stake?”

— Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu