My person was hideous and my stature gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them.
Interpretation
The quote reflects a deep existential crisis and a search for identity, questioning one's nature and purpose.
In this quote, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley explores profound themes of self-identity and existentialism through the perspective of a character grappling with their grotesque appearance and immense stature. The repetition of existential questions about identity, origin, and destiny highlights the struggles individuals face in understanding their place in the world, especially when they find themselves at odds with societal norms or self-perception.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about the complexities of identity in literature.
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
What is a good man? A teacher of a bad man. What is a bad man? A good man's charge?
The most powerful movement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothing special, but is a yearning to escape from the limitations of our own weakness and an invocation of all Good to enter and abide with us.
We want to bear witness today that we know the relation between corporate greed and what goes on too often in the Supreme Court decisions.
One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.
(About sweeping).... What he was in FACT doing was moving the dirt around with a broom, to give it a change of scenery and a chance to make new friends.
You should always take a religion at its best and not at its worst, from its highest teachings and not from the lowest practices of some of its adherents.
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