Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Quotes

My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings.

With how many things are we on the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our inquiries.

These wonderful narrations inspired me with strange feelings. Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous, and magnificent, yet so vicious and base? He appeared at one time a mere scion of the evil principle and at another as all that can be conceived of noble and godlike.

Till society is very differently constituted, parents, I fear, will still insist on being obeyed because they will be obeyed, and constantly endeavor to settle that power on a divine right which will not bear the investigation of reason.

Allow me now to return to the cottagers, whose story excited in me such various feelings of indignation, delight, and wonder, but which all terminated in additional love and reverence for my protectors (for so I loved, in an innocent, half painful self-deceit, to call them).

…if I see but one smile on your lips when we meet, occasioned by this or any other exertion of mine, I shall need no other happiness.

It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my being

There is love in me the likes of which you’ve never seen. There is rage in me the likes of which should never escape. If I am not satisfied int he one, I will indulge the other.

I required kindness and sympathy, but I did not believe myself utterly unworthy of it.

How dreadful it is, to emerge from the oblivion of slumber, and to receive as a good morrow the mute wailing of one’s own hapless heart – to return from the land of deceptive dreams to the heavy knowledge of unchanged disaster!

My education was neglected, yet I was passionately fond of reading.

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.