Thomas de Quincey
Thomas de Quincey
Thomas Penson De Quinceywas an English essayist, best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Many scholars suggest that in publishing this work De Quincey inaugurated the tradition of addiction literature in the West...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth15 August 1785
memories forget feels
I feel that there is no such thing as ultimate forgetting; traces once impressed upon the memory are indestructible.
keys drug paradise
Thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium!
memories trustworthy notorious
It is notorious that the memory strengthens as you lay burdens upon it, and becomes trustworthy as you trust it.
girl laughter sound
The laughter of girls is, and ever was, among the delightful sounds of earth.
medicine mysterious progressive
No progressive knowledge will ever medicine that dread misgiving of a mysterious and pathless power given to words of a certain import.
ideas feelings style
The science of style as an organ of thought, of style in relation to the ideas and feelings, might be called the organology of style.
dust feet house
Out of the ruined lodge and forgotten mansion, bowers that are trodden under foot, and pleasure-houses that are dust, the poet calls up a palingenesis.
perfect may states
Even imperfection itself may have its ideal or perfect state.
blow wind ears
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.
misery chaos said
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.
night men years
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.
laughing long pleasure
Nobody will laugh long who deals much with opium: its pleasures even are of a grave and solemn complexion.
sun spectacles
Call for the grandest of all earthly spectacles, what is that? It is the sun going to his rest.
understanding mind faculty
The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind and the most to be distrusted.