Frankenstein

by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Destiny was too potent, and her immutable laws had decreed my utter and terrible destruction.

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

Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.

often, I say, I was tempted to plunge into the silent lake, that the waters might close over me and my calamities forever.

Before, I looked upon the accounts of vice and injustice that I read in books or heard from others as tales of ancient days or imaginary evils; at least they were remote and more familiar to reason than to the imagination; but now misery has come home, and men appear to me as monsters thirsting for each other’s blood.

The wounded deer dragging its fainting limbs to some untrodden brake, there to gaze upon the arrow which had pierced it, and to die, was but a type of me.

How mutable are our feelings, and how strange is that clinging love we have of life even in the excess of misery!