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"Sometimes I could cope with the sullen despair that overwhelmed me: but sometimes the whirlwind passions of my soul drove me to seek, by bodily exercise and by change of place, some relief from my intolerable sensations. It was during an access of this kind that I suddenly left my home, and bending my steps towards the near Alpine valleys, sought in the magnificence, the eternity of such scenes, to forget myself and my ephemeral, because human, sorrows."
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"It's despair at the lack of (I'm cheating, I didn't say all these things - but I'm going to write what I want to say as well as what I did) feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It's despair that so few of us care. It's despair that there's so much brutality and callousness in the world."

"I was dying. And I had never been enough for anything."

"I'm not a good kid. Yeah, look, I'm just a piece of paper with the word sad and a bunch of cuss words written on it.A lousy piece of paper. That's me.A piece of paper that's waiting to be torn up."

"No one knows while experiencing their darkest hour that some day they may use that very experience to illuminate the ways for others. Nothing is ever wasted."

"I want to go to sleep and not wake up, but I don't want to die."

"This planet is a broken bone that didn't set right, a hundred pieces of crystal glued together. We've been shattered and reconstructed, told to make an effort every single day to pretend we still function the way we're supposed to. But it's a lie, it's all a lie."

"Don't despair, not even over the fact that you don't despair."
Explore more quotes by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

"Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of voice, but out of chaos."

"I need not describe the feelings of those whose dearest ties are rent by that most irreparable evil, the void that presents itself to the soul, and the despair that is exhibited on the countenance. It is so long before the mind can persuade itself that she whom we saw everyday and whose very existence appeared a part of our own can have departed forever - that the brightness of a beloved eye can have been extinguished and the sound of a voice so familiar and dear to the ear can be hushed, never more to be heard. (...) The time at length arrives when grief is rather an indulgence than a necessity; and the smile that plays upon the lips, although it may be deemed a sacrilege, is not banished."

"It is hardly surprising that women concentrate on the way they look instead of what is in their minds since not much has been put in their minds to begin with."

"Oh, had I, weak and faint of speech, words to teach my fellow-creatures the beauty and capabilities of man's mind; could I, or could one more fortunate, breathe the magic word which would reveal to all the power, which we all possess, to turn evil to good, foul to fair; then vice and pain would desert the new-born world!It is not thus: the wise have taught, the good suffered for us; we are still the same; and still our own bitter experience and heart-breaking regrets teach us to sympathize too feelingly with a tale like this."

"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..."

"Remember that I have power; you believe yourself miserable, but I can make you so wretched that the light of day will be hateful to you. You are my creator, but I am your master;--obey!"

"My courage and my resolution is firm; but my hopes fluctuate, and my spirits are often depressed."

"When tenderness softened her heart, and the sublime feeling of universal love penetrated her, she found no voice that replied so well to hers as the gentle singing of the pines under the air of noon, and the soft murmurs of the breeze that scattered her hair and freshened her cheek, and the dashing of the waters that has no beginning or end."
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