The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

by Robert Louis Stevenson

“I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.”

or is it the mere radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires through, and transfigures, its clay continent?

The rosy man had grown pale; his flesh had fallen away; he was visibly balder and older; and yet it was not so much these tokens of a swift physical decay that arrested the lawyer’s notice, as a look in the eye and quality of manner that seemed to testify to some deep-seated terror of the mind. It was unlikely that the doctor should fear death; and yet that was what Utterson was tempted to suspect.

If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also.

I could not think that this earth contained a place for sufferings and terrors so unmanning; and you can do but one thing, Utterson, to lighten this destiny, and that is to respect my silence.”

I saw what I saw, I heard what I heard, and my soul sickened at it;

sleep has left me; the deadliest terror sits by me at all hours of the day and night; and I feel that my days are numbered, and that I must die; and yet I shall die incredulous.

a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death.

Instantly the spirit of hell awoke in me and raged.

Under the strain of this continually impending doom and by the sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, ay, even beyond what I had thought possible to man, I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self.

images of terror, a soul boiling with causeless hatreds, and a body that seemed not strong enough to contain the raging energies of life.

insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born;

he would long ago have ruined himself in order to involve me in the ruin.

But his love of me is wonderful; I go further: I, who sicken and freeze at the mere thought of him, when I recall the abjection and passion of this attachment, and when I know how he fears my power to cut him off by suicide, I find it in my heart to pity him.