"If any man wants to gain a good opinion of his fellow men, he ought to do what I am doing: pester them with letters."

"Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy of the interposition of a deity. More humble, and I believe truer, to consider him created from animals."

"I am dying by inches, from not having any body to talk to about insects..."

"What an extraordinary thing it is, Mr. Darwin seems to spend hours in cracking a horse-whip in his room, for I often hear the crack when I pass under his windows."

"But I am very poorly today & very stupid & I hate everybody & everything. One lives only to make blunders."

"When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled."

"I have stated, that in the thirteen species of ground-finches, a nearly perfect gradation may be traced, from a beak extraordinarily thick, to one so fine, that it may be compared to that of a warbler."

"I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work; and I still think there is an eminently important difference."

"Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a fantasy."

"Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea."

"I didn't have any friends at school, didn't want any. I felt better being alone. I sat on a bench and watched the others play and they looked foolish to me."

"I wasn't a misanthrope and I wasn't a misogynist but I liked being alone. It felt good to sit alone in a small space and smoke and drink. I had always been good company for myself."

"Each man's hell is in a different place: mine is just up and behind my ruined face."

"Baby," I said, "I'm a genius but nobody knows it but me."

"I know that pain is the one nobility / upon which Hell itself cannot encroach"

"But what does it matter what reality is outside myself, so long as it has helped me to live, to feel that I am, and what I am?"

"I can barely conceive a type of beauty in which there is no melancholy."

"Above my cradle loomed the bookcase where/ Latin ashes and the dust of Greece/ mingled with novels, history, and verse/ in one dark Babel. I was folio-high/ when I first heard the voices."

"I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy."

"It always seems to me that I should feel well in the place where I am not."

"I have felt the wind on the wing of madness."

"I am a cemetery by the moon unblessed."

"I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror."

"I walked the streets and tasted the golden sun that lay across the city."