Mary Shelley

These thoughts supported my spirits, while I pursued my undertaking with unremitting ardour.

In a thousand ways he smoothed for me the path of knowledge, and made the most abstruse inquiries clear and facile to my apprehension.

As I was in a state of extreme debility, I resolved to sail directly towards the town, as a place where I could most easily procure nourishment.

And thus for a time I was occupied by exploded systems, mingling, like an unadept, a thousand contradictory theories and floundering desperately in a very slough of multifarious knowledge […].

Last Monday (July 31st) we were nearly surrounded by ice, which closed in the ship on all sides, scarcely leaving her the sea-room in which she floated.

Twice I actually hired myself as an under-mate in a Greenland whaler, and acquitted myself to admiration.

My brothers were considerably younger than myself; but I had a friend in one of my schoolfellows, who compensated for this deficiency.

The country in the neighbourhood of this village resembled, to a greater degree, the scenery of Switzerland; but every thing is on a lower scale, and the green hills want the crown of distant white Alps, which always attend on the piny mountains of my native country.

I have no ambition to lose my life on the post-road between St. Petersburgh and Archangel.

I believe that I have no enemy on earth, and none surely would have been so wicked as to destroy me wantonly.

As I returned my fervent hopes were dashed by so many fears.

Yet active life was the genuine soil for his virtues; and he sometimes suffered tedium from the monotonous succession of events in our retirement.

Take me—mould me to your will, possess my heart and soul to all eternity.

Yet let us goǃ England is in her shroud – we may not enchain ourselves to a corpse.

With the numerous soldiers of Asia, with all of their warlike stores, ships, and military engines, that wealth and power could command, the Turks at once resolved to crush an enemy which, creeping on by degrees, had from their strong-hold in the Morea acquired Thrace and Macedonia, and had led their armies even to the gates of Constantinople, while their extensive commercial relations gave every European nation an interest in their success.

In her resentful mood, these expressions had been remembered with acrimony and disdain; [...].

England, seated far north in the turbid sea, now visits my dreams in the semblance of a vast and well-manned ship, which mastered the winds and rode proudly over the waves.