The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

by Robert Louis Stevenson

his affections, like ivy, were the growth of time, they implied no aptness in the object.

There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something down-right detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why.

“If he be Mr. Hyde,” he had thought, “I shall be Mr. Seek.”

if ever I read Satan’s signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend.”

even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both;

I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine.

And yet when I looked upon that ugly idol in the glass, I was conscious of no repugnance, rather of a leap of welcome. This, too, was myself.

This, as I take it, was because all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.

and from these agonies of death and birth, I had come forth an angel instead of a fiend.

All things therefore seemed to point to this; that I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse.

Jekyll had more than a father’s interest; Hyde had more than a son’s indifference.

he thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of something not only hellish but inorganic. This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this again, that that 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; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life.