Prophet of evil I ever am to myself: forced for ever into sorrowful auguries that I have no power to hide from my own heart, no, not through one nigh… - Thomas De Quincey

If a man calls himself a philosopher and never had his life attempted, rest assured there is nothing in him, and against [John] Locke's philosophy, in particular, I think is an unanswerable objection (that we needed any) that, although he carried his throat about with him in this world for seventy-two years, no man ever condescended to cut it. [On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, 1827]

I do not readily believe that any man having once tasted the divine luxuries of opium will afterwards descend to the gross and mortal enjoyments of alcohol, I take it for granted

no moment was his sense of the complete suspension and pause in ordinary human concerns so full and affecting, as at that moment when the suspension ceases, and the goings-on of human life are suddenly resumed.