Top 380 Mary Shelley Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “After the murder of Clerval, I returned to Switzerland, heart-broken and overcome. I pitied Frankenstein; my pity amounted to horror: I abhorred myself.”

— Mary Shelley

202. “Our lives will not be happy, but they will be harmless, and free from the misery I now feel. Oh! my creator, make me happy; let me feel gratitude towards you for one benefit!”

— Mary Shelley

203. “Follow me; I seek the everlasting ices of the north, where you will feel the misery of cold and frost, to which I am impassive.”

— Mary Shelley

204. “Even the eternal skies weep, I thought; is there any shame then, that mortal man should spend himself in tears?”

— Mary Shelley

205. “The time at length arrives when grief is rather an indulgence than a necessity.”

— Mary Shelley

206. “The companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain.”

— Mary Shelley

207. “Remember, that I am thy creature: I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.”

— Mary Shelley

208. “The ambition of the inquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.”

— Mary Shelley

209. “There was a sense of justice in my father’s upright mind which rendered it necessary that he should approve highly to love strongly.”

— Mary Shelley

210. “You must create a female for me with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being. This you alone can do, and I demand it of you as a right which you must not refuse to concede.”

— Mary Shelley

211. “I dared not advance, dreading a thousand nameless evils that made me tremble, although I was unable to define them.”

— Mary Shelley

212. “I was guiltless, but I had indeed drawn down a horrible curse upon my head, as mortal as that of crime.”

— Mary Shelley

213. “I am thy creature, and I will be even mild and docile to my natural lord and king, if thou wilt also perform thy part, the which thou owest me.”

— Mary Shelley

214. “Ah! It is well for the unfortunate to be resigned, but for the guilty there is no peace. The agonies of remorse poison the luxury there is otherwise sometimes found in indulging the excess of grief.”

— Mary Shelley

215. “Unfeeling, heartless creator! You had endowed me with perceptions and passions, and then cast me abroad an object for the scorn and horror of mankind.”

— Mary Shelley

216. “God in pity made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid from its very resemblance.”

— Mary Shelley

217. “For while I destroyed his hopes, I did not satisfy my own desires. They were for ever ardent and craving; still I desired love and fellowship, and I was still spurned.”

— Mary Shelley

218. “One by one, her brothers and sister died; and her mother, with the exception of her neglected daughter, was left childless. The conscience of the woman was troubled; she began to think that the deaths of her favourites was a judgement from heaven to chastise her partiality. She was a Roman.”

— Mary Shelley

219. “The words induced me to turn towards myself. I learned that the possessions most esteemed by your fellow creatures were high and unsullied descent united with riches. A man might be respected with only one of these advantages, but without either he was considered, except in very rare instances. as a vagabond and a slave, doomed to waste his powers for the profits of the chosen few!”

— Mary Shelley

220. “Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind, when it has once seized on it, like a lichen on the rock.”

— Mary Shelley

221. “The guilty are allowed, by human laws, bloody as they may be, to speak in their own defence before they are condemned. Listen to me, Frankenstein. You accuse me of murder; and yet you would, with a satisfied conscience, destroy your own creature.”

— Mary Shelley

222. “I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks, which braces my nerves and fills me with delight. Do you understand this feeling? This breeze, which has traveled from the regions towards which I am advancing, gives me a foretaste of those icy climes. Inspirited by this wind of promise, my daydreams become more fervent and vivid.”

— Mary Shelley

223. “I look on the hands which executed the deed; I think on the heart in which the imagination of it was conceived, and long for the moment when these hands will meet my eyes, when that imagination will haunt my thoughts no more.”

— Mary Shelley

224. “I delighted in investigating the facts relative to the actual world; she busied herself in following the aerial creations of the poets. The world was to me a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own.”

— Mary Shelley

225. “This breeze, which has travelled from the regions towards which I am advancing, gives me a foretaste of those icy climes. Inspirited by this wind of promise, my day dreams become more fervent and vivid. I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight. There, Margaret, the sun is for ever visible; its broad disk just skirting the horizon, and diffusing a perpetual splendour.”

— Mary Shelley

226. “I shall die. I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me, or be the prey of feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched. He is dead who called me into being; and when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish. I shall no longer see the sun or stars, or feel the winds play on my cheeks. Light, feeling, and sense, will pass away; and in this condition must I find my happiness.”

— Mary Shelley

227. “These are the reflections of the first days; but when the lapse of time proves the reality of the evil, then the actual bitterness of grief commences.”

— Mary Shelley

228. “Then the appearance of death was distant, although the wish was ever present to my thoughts, and I often sat for hours motionless and speechless, wishing for some mighty revolution that might bury me and my destroyer in its ruins.”

— Mary Shelley

229. “But liberty had been a useless gift to me had I not, as I awakened to reason, at the same time awakened to revenge.”

— Mary Shelley

230. “I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain.”

— Mary Shelley

231. “During this conversation I had retired to a corner of the prison-room, where I could conceal the horrid anguish that possessed me. Despair! Who dared talked of that? The poor victim, who on the morrow was to pass the dreary boundary between life and death, felt not as I did, such deep and bitter agony.”

— Mary Shelley

232. “Perhaps we did not read so many books, or learn languages so quickly, as those who are disciplined according to the ordinary methods; but what we learned was impressed the more deeply on our memories.”

— Mary Shelley

233. “All my speculations and hopes are as nothing; and, like the archangel who aspired to omnipotence, I am chained in an eternal hell.”

— Mary Shelley

234. “During the day I was sustained and inspirited by the hope of night: for in sleep I saw my friends, my wife, and my beloved country; again I saw the benevolent countenance of my father, heard the silver tones of my Elizabeth’s voice, and beheld Clerval enjoying health and.”

— Mary Shelley

235. “I swear to you, by the earth which I inhabit, and by you that made me, that, with the companion you bestow, I will quit the neighbourhood of man, and dwell, as it may chance, in the most savage of places.”

— Mary Shelley

236. “My dear Victor, do not speak thus. 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. Our circle will be small, but bound close by the ties of affection and mutual misfortune. And when time shall have softened your despair, new and dear objects of care will be born to replace those of whom we have been so cruelly deprived.”

— Mary Shelley

237. “I shall relate events that impressed me with feelings which, from what I had been, have made me what I am.”

— Mary Shelley

238. “To be a great and virtuous man appeared the highest honour that can befall a sensitive being; to be base and vicious, as many on record have been, appeared the lowest degradation, a condition more abject than that of the blind mole or harmless worm. For a long time I could not conceive how one man could go forth to murder his fellow, or even why there were laws and governments; but when I heard details of vice and bloodshed, my wonder ceased, and I turned away with disgust and loathing.”

— Mary Shelley

239. “I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me; whose eyes would reply to mine. You may deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend.”

— Mary Shelley

240. “The tranquillity which I now enjoyed did not endure. Memory brought madness with it; and.”

— Mary Shelley

241. “My life might have been passed in ease and luxury; but I preferred glory to every enticement that wealth placed in my path.”

— Mary Shelley

242. “Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me.”

— Mary Shelley

243. “It was a strong effort of the spirit of good, but it was ineffectual. Destiny was too potent, and her immutable laws had decreed my utter and terrible destruction.”

— Mary Shelley

244. “Sometimes I endeavoured to gain from Frankenstein the particulars of his creature’s formation; but on this point he was impenetrable.”

— Mary Shelley

245. “But is it not a duty to the survivors, that we should refrain from augmenting their unhappiness by an appearance of immoderate grief?”

— Mary Shelley

246. “I postponed this attempt for some months longer; for the importance attached to its success inspired me with a dread lest I shall fail.”

— Mary Shelley

247. “I am alone – quite alone – in the world – the blight of misfortune has passed over me and withered me; I know that I am about to die and I feel happy – joyous.”

— Mary Shelley

248. “Perhaps during former years he had suffered from the late-discovered unworthiness of one beloved, and so was disposed to set a greater value on tried worth.”

— Mary Shelley

249. “Once my fancy was soothed with dreams of virtue, of fame, and of enjoyment. Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings, who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of bringing forth. I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion. But now vice has degraded me beneath the meanest animal.”

— Mary Shelley

250. “I am, by a course of strange events, become the most miserable of mortals. Persecuted and tortured as I am and have been, can death be any evil to me?”

— Mary Shelley