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For my own part, I have never had a thought which I could not set down in words, with even more distinctness than that with which I conceived it.

Edgar Allan Poe

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Edgar Allan Poe
Age: 40 †
Born: 1809
Born: January 19
Died: 1849
Died: October 7
Author
Crime Writer
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Theorist
Lyricist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Poe
Edgar Poe
E. A. Poe
Part
Even
Never
Distinctness
Conceived
Words
Thought

More quotes by Edgar Allan Poe

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You are not wrong who deem That my days have been a dream Yet if hope has flown away In a night, or in a day, In a vision, or in none, Is it therefore the less gone? All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream.
Edgar Allan Poe
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If a man deceives me once, shame on him if he deceives me twice, shame on me.
Edgar Allan Poe
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A fool, for example, thinks Shakespeare a great poet . . . yet the fool has never read Shakespeare.
Edgar Allan Poe
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I could have clasped the red walls to my bosom as a garment of eternal peace. Death, I said, any death but that of the pit! Fool! might I have not known that into the pit it was the object of the burning iron to urge me?
Edgar Allan Poe
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...for her whom in life thou dids't abhor, in death thou shalt adore
Edgar Allan Poe
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Tell a scoundrel, three or four times a day, that he is the pink of probity, and you make him at least the perfection of respectability in good earnest. On the other hand, accuse an honorable man, too petinaciously, of being a villain, and you fill him with a perverse ambition to show you that you are not altogether in the wrong.
Edgar Allan Poe
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A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong.
Edgar Allan Poe
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It is clear that a poem may be improperly brief. Undue brevity degenerates into mere epigrammatism. A very short poem, while now and then producing a brilliant or vivid, never produces a profound or enduring, effect. There must be the steady pressing down of the stamp upon the wax.
Edgar Allan Poe
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And so, being young and dipt in folly, I fell in love with melancholy.
Edgar Allan Poe
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The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?
Edgar Allan Poe
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In other words, I believed, and still do believe, that truth, is frequently of its own essence, superficial, and that, in many cases, the depth lies more in the abysses where we seek her, than in the actual situations wherein she may be found.
Edgar Allan Poe
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I have been happy, though in a dream. I have been happy-and I love the theme: Dreams! in their vivid colouring of life As in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife
Edgar Allan Poe
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In one case out of a hundred a point is excessively discussed because it is obscure in the ninety-nine remaining it is obscure because it is excessively discussed.
Edgar Allan Poe
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In the tale proper--where there is no space for development of character or for great profusion and variety of incident--mere construction is, of course, far more imperatively demanded than in the novel.
Edgar Allan Poe
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I have great faith in fools,— self-confidence my friends will call it.
Edgar Allan Poe
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Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.
Edgar Allan Poe
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Once upon a midnight dreary
Edgar Allan Poe
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Sound-- That stealeth ever on the ear of him Who, musing, gazeth on the distance dim, And sees the darkness coming as a cloud-- Is not its form--its voice--most palpable and loud?
Edgar Allan Poe
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I never can hear a crowd of people singing and gesticulating, all together, at an Italian opera, without fancying myself at Athens, listening to that particular tragedy, by Sophocles, in which he introduces a full chorus of turkeys, who set about bewailing the death of Meleager.
Edgar Allan Poe
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The mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate them only in their effects. We know of them, among other things, that they are always to their possessor, when inordinately possessed, a source of the liveliest enjoyment.
Edgar Allan Poe