Suspiria de Profundis Quotes

“Rightly it is said of utter, utter misery, that it 'cannot be remembered'; itself, being a rememberable thing, is swallowed up in its own chaos.”
― Thomas de Quincey, Suspira de Profundis, Being a Sequel to the Confessions of an English Opium-eater

“I stood checked for a moment - awe, not fear, fell upon me - and whist I stood, a solemn wind began to blow, the most mournful that ever ear heard. Mournful! That is saying nothing. It was a wind that had swept the fields of mortality for a hundred centuries.”
― Thomas de Quincey, Suspira de Profundis, Being a Sequel to the Confessions of an English Opium-eater

“All is finite in the present; and even that finite is infinite in it velocity of flight towards death. But in God there is nothing finite...Upon a night of earthquake he builds a thousand years of pleasant habitations for man. Upon the sorrow of an infant he raises oftentimes from human intellects glorious vintages that could not else have been.”
― Thomas de Quincey, Suspira de Profundis, Being a Sequel to the Confessions of an English Opium-eater

“Whilst I stood, a solemn wind began to blow—the most mournful that ear ever heard. Mournful! That is saying nothing. It was a wind that had swept the fields of mortality for a thousand centuries. Many times since, upon a summer day, when the sun is at its hottest, I have heard the same wind arising and uttering the same hollow, solemn, Memnonian, but saintly swell: it is in this world the one sole audible symbol of eternity.”
― Thomas de Quincey, Suspira de Profundis, Being a Sequel to the Confessions of an English Opium-eater

“Quanta la solitudine, altrettanta la forza.”
― Thomas de Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis

“And when I was told insultingly to cease 'my girlish tears,' that word 'girlish' had no sting for me, except as a verbal echo to the one eternal thought of my heart - that a girl was the sweetest thing I, in my short life, had known - that a girl it was who had crowned the earth with beauty, and had opened to my thirst fountains of pure celestial love, from which, in this world, I was to drink no more.”
― Thomas De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis

“Death we can face: but knowing, as some of us do, what is human life, which of us is it that without shuddering could (if consciously we were summoned) face the hour of birth?”
― Thomas de Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis