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Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heartone of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man.

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
Sentiments
Lives
Primitive
Character
Primaries
Give
Primary
Soul
Faculty
Perverseness
Human
Impulse
Indivisible
Humans
Direction
Impulses
Giving
Faculties
Men
Sure

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-ev'n with us the breath Of Science dims the mirror of our joy.
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The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame.
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Over the Mountains Of the Moon, Down the Valley of the Shadow, Ride, boldly ride, The shade replied,- If you seek for Eldorado.
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The true genius shudders at incompleteness - and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.
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My next thought concerned the choice of an impression, or effect, to be conveyed: and here I may as well observe that, throughout the construction, I kept steadily in view the design.
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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.
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Villains!' I shrieked. 'Dissemble no more! I admit the deed! Tear up the planks! Here, here! It is the beating of his hideous heart!
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One half of the pleasure experienced at a theatre arises from the spectator's sympathy with the rest of the audience, and, especially from his belief in their sympathy with him.
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The writer who neglects punctuation, or mispunctuates, is liable to be misunderstood for the want of merely a comma, it often occurs that an axiom appears a paradox, or that a sarcasm is converted into a sermonoid.
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The unity of effect or impression is a point of the greatest importance. It is clear, moreover, that this unity cannot be thoroughly preserved in productions whose perusal cannot be completed at one sitting.
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There might be a class of beings, human once, but now to humanity invisible, for whose scrutiny, and for whose refined appreciation of the beautiful, more especially than for our own, had been set in order by God the great landscape-garden of the whole earth.
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There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of him who, shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a Plunge.
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The ninety and nine are with dreams, content but the hope of the world made new, is the hundredth man who is grimly bent on making those dreams come true.
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The rain came down upon my head - Unshelter'd. And the wind rendered me mad and deaf and blind.
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The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist
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For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams of the beautiful Annabel Lee
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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.
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A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.
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A mystery, and a dream, should my early life seem.
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To speak algebraically, Mr. M. is execrable, but Mr. G. is (x + 1)- ecrable.
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