The Masquee of the Red Death

by Edgar Allan Poe

 

While reading quotes by Edgar Allan Poe, keep in mind how dark everything is...

 

 

 

"The 'Red Death' had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous" (3).

 

"There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and the profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution" (3).

 

"But the prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand half and light-heated friends from among and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys" (3).

 

"The seventh apartment was closely shrouded in black velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the walls, falling in heavy folds upon a carpet of the same material and hue" (4).

 

"But in the western or black chamber the effect of the firelight that streamed upon the dark hangings through the blood-tinted panes, was ghastly in the extreme, and produced so wild a look upon the countenances of those who entered, that there were few of the company bold enough to set foot within its precincts at all" (5).

 

"There were much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust" (6).

"But to the chamber which lies most westwardly of the seven, there are now none of the maskers who venture; for the night is waning away; and there flows a ruddier light through the blood-colored panes; and the blackness of the sable drapery appalls; and to him whose foot falls upon the sale carpet, there comes from the near clock of ebony a muffled peal more solemnly emphatic than any which reaches their ears who indulge in the more remote gaieties of the other apartments" (7).

"There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made" (8).

"Then, summoning the wild courage of despair, a throng of revelers at once threw themselves into the black apartment, and, seizing the mummer, whose tall figure stood erect and motionless within the shadow of the ebony clock, gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave cerements and corpse-like mask, which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form" (10).

"And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all" (10).