"The rays of the gas-lamps, feeble at first in their struggle with the dying day, had now at length gained ascendancy, and threw over every thing a fitful and garish lustre."
- Edgar Allan Poe, The Man of the Crowd ... See MoreSee Less

"When I had ceased for an hour or so to take any trouble about the matter, I found myself on a swing-bridge looking down at some dark locks in some dirty water."
- Charles Dickens, The Uncommercial Traveller ... See MoreSee Less

"Although the town lies blue and darkling on her hills, innumerable spots of the bright element shine far and near along the pavements and upon the high facades."
- Robert Louis Stevenson, Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes ... See MoreSee Less

"A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other."
- Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities ... See MoreSee Less

"A dense fog hung over the city, blotting out the stars and turning the gas lamps into dim, yellow smears against the immense dark."
- Bram Stoker, Dracula ... See MoreSee Less

"The delicate die early, and I, as a survivor, among bleak winds and plumping rain, have been sometimes tempted to envy them their fate."
- Robert Louis Stevenson, Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes ... See MoreSee Less

"They reached the feeble light, which came from the smoky lamp of a little railway station; a poor enough terrestrial star, yet in one sense of more importance than the sun in heaven."
- Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles ... See MoreSee Less

"The fog still slept on the wing above the drowned city, where the lamps glimmered like carbuncles; and through the muffle and smother of these fallen clouds, the procession of the town's life was still rolling in through the great arteries with a sound as of a mighty wind."
- Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde ... See MoreSee Less

"Friendship is less simple. It is long and hard to obtain, but when one has it there's no getting rid of it; one simply has to cope with it."
- Albert Camus, The Fall ... See MoreSee Less

"The sun was sinking. The hard stone of the day was cracked and light poured through its splinters. Red and gold shot through the waves, in rapid running arrows, feathered with darkness."
- Virginia Woolf, The Waves ... See MoreSee Less

"A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space."
- Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space ... See MoreSee Less

"Another circumstance, too, worried me in those days: that there was no one like me and I was unlike anyone else. “I am alone and they are everyone,” I thought - and pondered."
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground ... See MoreSee Less

"I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move."
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses ... See MoreSee Less

"At length he suddenly turned into a narrow court, and knocked at an arched door, which seemed to belong to a building of some antiquity."
- Walter Scott, My Aunt Margaret's Mirror ... See MoreSee Less

"The way is so narrow that you can lay a hand on either wall; so steep that, in greasy winter weather, the pavement is almost as treacherous as ice."
- Robert Louis Stevenson, Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes ... See MoreSee Less