Thomas De Quincey
Biography
(1785-1859)
A prodigy, a runaway, and an addict, Thomas De Quincey was the black sheep of a family struggling to deal with the death of their father. Despite his academic muscle, De Quincey couldn't keep himself in school, and by age 16, he found himself wandering the English countryside, stretching a guinea a week to make ends meet. After repeated attempts by his family to get him in school and keep him there, De Quincey was left to himself. He finally left college after five years, but his opium habits and his love of literature lead him to seek out the company and advice of the Lake District poets. He eventually married and ended up moving to the Lake District himself, where he wrote as much for the love of literature as for the exigency of food. His most famous work, Confessions of an English Opium Eater,appeared serially in London Magazine and was eventually published in book form. He continued to contribute to magazines around London the rest of his life, and never kicked the opium habit.
(Compiled by Joey Franklin)
See also
Essays by Thomas De Quincey
Charles Lamb, if any ever was is amongst the class here contemplated; he, if any ever has, ranks amongst writers whose works are destined to be forever unpopular, and yet forever interesting; interesting, moreover, by means of those very qualities which guarantee their non-popularity.
A thousand times has he followed thee in the worlds of sleep... through fugues and the persecution of fugues; through dreams, and the dreadful resurrections that are in dreams--only that at the last, with one motion of his victorious arm, he might record and emblazon the endless resurrections of his love!
No man ever will unfold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at least checker his life with solitude.
This post-office service recalled some mighty orchestra, where a thousand instruments, all disregarding each other, and so far in danger of discord, yet all obedient as slaves to the supreme
baton of some great leader, terminate in a perfection of harmony like that of heart, veins, and arteries, in a healthy animal organization.
Among world-wide objects of speculation, objects rising to the dignity of a mundane or cosmopolitish value, which challenge at this time more than ever a growing intellectual interest, is the English language.
...but that, the further we press in our discoveries, the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where the careless eye had seen nothing but accident!
Let us call them, therefore, Our Ladies of Sorrow. I know them thoroughly, and have walked in all their kingdoms.
Of all the men of talents, whose writings I have read up to this hour, Mr. Malthus has the most perplexed understanding. He is not only confused himself, but is the cause that confusion is in other men.
Death we can face: but knowing, as some of us do, what is human life, which of us is it that without shuddering could (if consciously we were summoned) face the hour of birth?
A new paper on Murder as a Fine Art might open thus: that on the model of those Gentlemen Radicals who had voted a monument to Palmer, etc., it was proposed to erect statues to such murderers as should by their next-of-kin, or other person interested in their glory, make out a claim either of superior atrocity, or, in equal atrocity, of superior neatness, continuity of execution, perfect preparation or felicitous originality, smoothness or _curiosa felicitas_ (elaborate felicity).
Yes, reader, countless are the mysterious hand-writings of grief or joy which have inscribed themselves successively upon the palimpsest of your brain.
The time which is contracts into a mathematic point; and even that point perishes a thousand times before we can utter its birth. All is finite in the present; and even that finite is infinite in its velocity of flight towards death.
These statements tended to one of two results: either they unsanctified the characters of those who founded and nursed the Christian church; or they sanctified suicide.
These statements tended to one of two results: either they unsanctified the characters of those who founded and nursed the Christian church; or they sanctified suicide.
...amongst the Jews every custom, the most trivial, is also part of their legislation; and their legislation is also their religion.
There is, first, the Literature of Knowledge; and, secondly, the Literature of Power. The function of the first is — to teach; the function of the second is — to move
The holiest sight upon which the eyes of God settle in Almighty sanction and perfect blessing is the love which soon kindles between the mother and her infant.
The holiest sight upon which the eyes of God settle in Almighty sanction and perfect blessing is the love which soon kindles between the mother and her infant.
Doubt there can be little that without any religion, any sense of dependency, or gratitude, or reverence as to superior natures, man would rapidly have deteriorated.
Even so in dreams, perhaps, under some secret conflict of the midnight sleeper, lighted up to the consciousness at the time, but darkened to the memory as soon as all is finished, each several child of our mysterious race completes for himself the aboriginal fall.
My object is to show that the ancients, that even the Greeks, could not support the idea of immortality.
