Polluted by crimes, and torn by the bitterest remorse, where can I find rest but in death?
Interpretation
The quote expresses a profound sense of despair and the search for peace amidst deep regret and guilt.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's quote poignantly reflects the emotional turmoil experienced when one feels burdened by guilt and remorse for their actions. It captures the notion that in the face of overwhelming crime and regret, the only escape from pain may seem to be death, highlighting the depths of despair and the human experience of searching for solace or relief from suffering.
In practice
During a discussion on the themes of guilt in literature, this quote can be used to emphasize the depth of characters' emotional struggles.
Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of a void, but out of chaos; the materials must in the first place be afforded; it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.
The instructor can scarcely give sensibility where it is essentially wanting, nor talent to the unpercipient block. But he can cultivate and direct the affections of the pupil, who puts forth, as a parasite, tendrils by which to cling, not knowing to what - to a supporter or a destroyer.
What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.
I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me, whose eyes would reply to mine.
Heavy misfortunes have befallen us, but let us only cling closer to what remains, and transfer our love for those whom we have lost to those who yet live. Our circle will be small, but bound close by the ties of affection and mutual misfortune. And when time shall have softened your despair, new and dear objects of care will be born to replace those of whom we have been so cruelly deprived.
Hateful day when I received life!' I exclaimed in agony. 'Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemlance. Satan had his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and abhorred.' - Frankenstein
It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.
I am resolved that I will not through humility become the devil's attorney. I will endeavor to speak a good word for the truth.
On this thin, scarcely real and yet so perceptible sensation the whole world hung as on a faintly trembling axis, and this in turn rested on the two people in the room.
I wondered whether I could find a Great Perhaps here at all or whether I had made a grand miscalculation.
Please open your eyes now, but keep attention in the inner energy field of the body as you look around the room. The inner body lies at the threshold between your form identity and your essence identity, your true nature. Never lose touch with it.
For the historian everything begins and ends with time, a mathematical, godlike_x000D_ _x000D_ time, a notion easily mocked, time external to men, 'exogenous,' as economists_x000D_ _x000D_ would say, pushing men, forcing them, and painting their own individual times_x000D_ _x000D_ the same color: it is, indeed, the imperious time of the world.
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