Quotations Weblog

Edgar Allan Poe specialized in touching on themes entirely too horrible. As a young adult, we were forced to read The Tell-Tale Heart several times. The school system seemed to overlook the fact that he had written many other stories. Sadly, senior year, the curriculum called for The Masque of the Red Death, which is entirely too allegorical for teenagers.

They should have made us read The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar. It was a brilliant story about forestalling death using hypnosis. It shows the early American viewpoints on science and hypnosis, where they were intermingled as if both were equally valid. It’s also creepy as they come. If only they had assigned that story.

I would have also liked to read the The Cask of Amontillado before I became an adult. The petty rage and the sheer horror of the end of it is far more terrifying than The Pit and the Pendulum. Unidentified torturers are far less scary than a friend gone made with angry revenge.

I thought that I was a Poe Specialist until I played the game, The Dark Eye. It is a computer game that is based on the stories of Edgar Allan Poe starring the voice of William S. Burroughs. It is a beautiful reinactment of some of Poe’s scariest stories. You play through each story through the eyes of the villian and the victim. It’s a wonderful game to play when you’re alone home at night during a rain storm.

• Edgar Allan Poe Quotes – The Quotations Page

I don’t particularly like being scared. I don’t watch scary movies. I don’t participate in extreme sports. I don’t read horror novels. I prefer scientific explanations of legends to the legends themselves. I don’t like to be scared, but I love stories about ghosts, vampires and werewolves.

So many of the legends have an element of a blessing to them. Vampires are allowed to live forever. Werewolves have one night a month where they are forced to be violent and aggressive animals. Ghosts promise a continuation of consciousness after death. Even Frankenstein lets us hope for reanimation.

We love stories about these literary characters because we place ourselves in the place of the villains. We imagine how we would conduct our immortal lives, addicted to blood. We wonder how we would be able to contain our animal desires when the full moon rises. We worry about our sentience being trapped in a house after our bodies have rotted. It’s not fear that makes us love stories about ghosts, vampires and werewolves; it’s desire.

Since we are nearing Halloween, here is a perfect book to satisfy your creepy reading desires. I finished reading Peeps, by Scott Westerfeld last week and it was a fun romp. There are a lot of quotes that I was able to cull from the book, but they all came from the first half. The last half of the book was so action-packed that there wasn’t much time for philosophizing.

This was a great book and a quick read. You could probably burn through this book in a day, so it’s great to grab for an enjoyable weekend. It’s the perfect read for this week right before Halloween.

For a plot synopsis and more information, see my review of this book on my weblog:

Pick Me! » Peeps by Scott Westerfeld

While we try to keep this site as accurate as possible, we do find an error from time to time. For example, what’s wrong with the following quote?

Thanks to one of our readers, Cory, for sending in that correction. While they’re not usually as inadvertently funny as that one, we greatly appreciate your letting us know when you find an error. Just click on a quote to get to its page, then click the Send us a comment link. Thanks again to all of you out there who have helped lighten our olives make the site better!

As I’ve built this site over the years, one of my favorite pastimes was finding quotations about quotations. Along with being introspective, these quotations also serve to justify the existence of a site like this—or to question its existence. Our subject page on quotations has 53 of these meta-quotes.

Continuing the my favorite quotations series, here are my favorite quotations about quotations.