‘My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy, and when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change without torture such as you cannot even imagine.
-Frankenstein, the creature
‘I am sick of myself… My head aches. My heart – my hapless heart – is deluged in bitterness… I strive to survive, I strive to write, but I cannot live without loving and being loved, without sympathy; if this is denied to me, I must die. Would that the hour were come!
-The Journals of Mary Shelley, September 5, 1826