Edgar Allan Poe Quotes, From the Tales and Poems

The best Edgar Allan Poe quotes almost all come from people who should not be trusted: a murderer insisting he is sane, a man who walls up his friend, a narrator who admits that men have called him mad. Below are thirteen lines from Poe’s tales, poems and critical essays, each copied from the full text, with the story it comes from and what the speaker is doing when he says it.

“Nevermore” is not here. It has been quoted to death, and the Raven deserves a rest. What is here shows the range Poe actually had: the horror writer, the inventor of the detective story, the love poet and the critic with firm rules about how long a poem should be.

Edgar Allan Poe quotes from the narrators who protest too much

1. The Tell-Tale Heart

True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?

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Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, opening sentence

The dashes do the acting. Before the story has a setting or a victim, the narrator is already arguing with someone who has accused him of madness, and losing. He goes on to prove his sanity by describing, very calmly, how he murdered an old man over an eye. By the last line he is shrieking at the police that the noise under the floor is the beating of his hideous heart.

2. The Cask of Amontillado

The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.

Edgar Allan Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado”, opening sentence

We never learn what the insult was. That is the joke and the horror of the story: Montresor is so certain of his grievance that he never thinks to explain it. Half a century later, by his own account, he is still telling it to someone, You, who so well know the nature of my soul, with no sign of regret.

3. The answer at the wall

“For the love of God, Montressor!”

“Yes,” I said, “for the love of God!”

Edgar Allan Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado”, near the end

Fortunato’s last real words, and Montresor simply hands them back. It is the cruellest exchange in Poe, because it is so polite. (This printing spells the name “Montressor” in the cry and “Montresor” elsewhere.) The story ends with two Latin words, In pace requiescat!, a blessing from the man who laid the last stone.

4. The Black Cat

Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart

Edgar Allan Poe, “The Black Cat”

The narrator is explaining why he hurt the cat he loved, and his theory is uncomfortably convincing. Who has not, he asks, done something stupid for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Poe liked the idea enough to build a whole tale on it, “The Imp of the Perverse”.

5. Eleonora

Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence

Edgar Allan Poe, “Eleonora”, opening paragraph

Another Poe narrator who opens with his sanity, but this one is proud of the charge. The sentence keeps going, asking whether all that is profound springs from disease of thought. It is the Romantic case for madness in one breath, put in the mouth of a man about to tell a love story.

Poe quotes on beauty, dreams and death

6. Ligeia

“There is no exquisite beauty,” says Bacon, Lord Verulam, speaking truly of all the forms and genera of beauty, “without some strangeness in the proportion.”

Edgar Allan Poe, “Ligeia”

Easy to mistake for Poe, but the narrator is quoting Francis Bacon, and says so. He uses the line to describe his wife’s face, which was beautiful precisely because it was not regular. As a piece of aesthetic theory it explains most of Poe’s own work: the strangeness is the point.

7. A Dream Within a Dream

All that we see or seem / Is but a dream within a dream.

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Edgar Allan Poe, “A Dream Within a Dream”, stanza 1

The first stanza says it calmly, after a kiss goodbye. The second turns it into panic: the speaker stands on a shore with sand running through his fingers, crying O God! can I not grasp / Them with a tighter clasp? The same couplet comes back at the end as a question. The Raven Edition dates the poem 1849.

8. Annabel Lee

I was a child and She was a child, / In this kingdom by the sea, / But we loved with a love that was more than love—

Edgar Allan Poe, “Annabel Lee”, stanza 2

The repetition is the whole effect: child, child, love, love, sea, sea. The introduction to the Raven Edition says the poem was written in 1849, the last year of Poe’s life, and reads it as grief for his young wife. The two Gutenberg texts also differ: the Raven Edition has the wind blow out of a cloud by night, where Ingram’s edition has it blow out of a cloud, chilling.

9. Alone

From childhood’s hour I have not been / As others were—I have not seen / As others saw

Edgar Allan Poe, “Alone”, in The Complete Poetical Works, ed. John H. Ingram

The poem every gloomy teenager finds eventually, and it ends on the line that explains why: And all I loved—I loved alone. A detail worth knowing: Ingram’s edition files it under “Doubtful Poems”. His note says it surfaced in Scribner’s Magazine in September 1875 and that there was nothing but internal evidence to guide us.

10. The Masque of the Red Death

And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

Edgar Allan Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death”, last sentence

Prince Prospero’s guests have locked themselves in an abbey to dance through a plague, and the plague walks in anyway. The final paragraph is built from sentences beginning “And”, like the end of a sermon, and this one caps it. Three capitalised nouns, and the prince is not one of them.

11. The Fall of the House of Usher

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country

Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, opening sentence

Say the first clause aloud and the d’s do the work before the meaning arrives. The sentence is a long ride, and the house appears only at its end, as the light goes. In the next sentence the narrator feels a sense of insufferable gloom, which is what Poe has spent the sentence making the reader feel too.

Poe the detective writer and critic

12. The Murders in the Rue Morgue

Thus there is such a thing as being too profound. Truth is not always in a well.

Edgar Allan Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”

Dupin is explaining where the police go wrong, and he picks on Vidocq, who impaired his vision by holding the object too close. The lesson, that the answer is often lying on the surface, is the one every detective story since has had to relearn. Dupin adds that truth is invariably superficial, which is a good joke from a man who loves to sound profound.

13. The Philosophy of Composition

the death, then, of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.

Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition”

This is Poe explaining, step by step, how he says he built “The Raven”: first the length, then the tone, then the refrain, and only then the subject. The cold logic of the reasoning is what makes the sentence so startling. In “The Poetic Principle” he went further: I hold that a long poem does not exist. He meant it. A poem, for Poe, was an excitement, and no excitement lasts.

Quick reference: Edgar Allan Poe quotes and their sources

Where to read more Poe

The Raven Edition introduction gives Poe’s dates as born in Boston, January 19, 1809, and died in Baltimore, October 7, 1849. It also claims that for “The Raven”, first published in 1845, the half-starved poet received $10! For what musicians later made of that poem, see our albums inspired by books.

Poe also kept notes in the margins of his books and published them as “Marginalia”, which we cover in our history of marginalia and in our history of the commonplace book. If you want more narrators who cannot be trusted, try our weirdest quotes in classic literature.

Sources

• Edgar Allan Poe, The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Raven Edition, Volume 1, Project Gutenberg
• Edgar Allan Poe, The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume 2, Project Gutenberg
• Edgar Allan Poe, The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume 3, Project Gutenberg
• Edgar Allan Poe, The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume 5, Project Gutenberg
• Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John H. Ingram, Project Gutenberg