Frankenstein Monster Quotes

I thought with a sensation of madness on my promise of creating another like him, and trembling with passion, tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged. The wretch saw me destroy the creature on whose future existence he depended for happiness, and with a howl of devilish despair and revenge, withdrew.

– Mary Shelley

Frankenstein, Chapter 20. Victor decides not to create a mate for his creature, after thinking about some of the dire consequences, like the possible mating of the two creatures. This provokes the creature to seek vengeance on his creator.

All was again silent, but his words rang in my ears. I burned with rage to pursue the murderer of my peace and precipitate him into the ocean. I walked up and down my room hastily and perturbed, while my imagination conjured up a thousand images to torment and sting me. Why had I not followed him and closed with him in mortal strife? But I had suffered him to depart, and he had directed his course towards the mainland. I shuddered to think who might be the next victim sacrificed to his insatiate revenge. And then I thought again of his words – “I will be with you on your wedding-night.” That, then, was the period fixed for the fulfillment of my destiny. In that hour I should die and at once satisfy and extinguish his malice. The prospect did not move me to fear; yet when I thought of my beloved Elizabeth, of her tears and endless sorrow, when she should find her lover so barbarously snatched from her, tears, the first I had shed for many months, streamed from my eyes, and I resolved not to fall before my enemy without a bitter struggle.

– Mary Shelley

Frankenstein, Chapter 20. After destroying the female monster, Victor reflects on the monster’s threat to be with him on his wedding night.

Great God! If for one instant I had thought what might be the hellish intention of my fiendish adversary, I would rather have banished myself forever from my native country and wandered a friendless outcast over the earth than have consented to this miserable marriage. But, as if possessed of magic powers, the monster had blinded me to his real intentions; and when I thought that I had prepared only my own death, I hastened that of a far dearer victim.

– Mary Shelley

Frankenstein, Chapter 22. Despite the creature warning that he will be with him on his wedding night, Victor goes ahead and marries Elizabeth. Appearing to believe the monster was just targeting him and not Elizabeth, he lives to regret this.

“I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion. But now crime has degraded me beneath the meanest animal. No guilt, no mischief, no malignity, no misery, can be found comparable to mine. When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.”

– Mary Shelley

Frankenstein, Chapter 24. The monster tells Robert Walton that even the enemy of God, Satan, had friends and companions. But he was created by Victor to be alone and without a companion.

“I have devoted my creator, the select specimen of all that is worthy of love and admiration among men, to misery; I have pursued him even to that irremediable ruin. There he lies, white and cold in death. You hate me, but your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself.”

– Mary Shelley

Frankenstein, Chapter 24. Part of the monster’s final monologue to Robert Walton, after the death of his creator Victor Frankenstein on the ship. Despite taking revenge, he has found no sense of justice.

“Some years ago, when the images which this world affords first opened upon me, when I felt the cheering warmth of summer and heard the rustling of the leaves and the warbling of the birds, and these were all to me, I should have wept to die; now it is my only consolation. Polluted by crimes and torn by the bitterest remorse, where can I find rest but in death?”

– Mary Shelley

Frankenstein, Chapter 24. The monster recalls his first experiences of the beauty of the natural world. He is now filled with remorse and a desire to die.

“Farewell, Frankenstein! If thou wert yet alive, and yet cherished a desire of revenge against me, it would be better satiated in my life than in my destruction. But it was not so; thou didst seek my extinction, that I might not cause greater wretchedness; and if yet, in some mode unknown to me, thou hadst not ceased to think and feel, thou wouldst not desire against me a vengeance greater than that which I feel. Blasted as thou wert, my agony was still superior to thine; for the bitter sting of remorse will not cease to rankle in my wounds until death shall close them for ever.”

– Mary Shelley

Frankenstein, Chapter 24. The monster’s parting words over the body of his dead creator Victor.

“Soon I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace, or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.”

– Mary Shelley

Frankenstein, Chapter 24. The monster’s final words to Robert Walton, before jumping onto an ice-raft to be “soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.”
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