Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.Narrator
There was and is a tower, which contained and contains the terrible stairs.Narrator
Instead of the poems I had hoped for, there came only a shuddering blackness and ineffable loneliness.Narrator
I know not how I came to live on such an uncanny spot, but the isolation and solitude are to me less perturbing than the proximity of others.Narrator
Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemonical hints of truth which make it a thousandfold more hideous.Narrator
It is true that I have escaped a dwelling most sinister and terrible, yet in leaving it I have not left the abode of horror—for horror is within me.Narrator
Until the time I ran away I had seen no human being save myself in a mirror, and my education under such conditions was as complete as it could be where all influences were kind and tender.Narrator
My knowledge of life was as vague and illusive as my conception of what lay about me in my eternal darkness.Narrator
Some of the stones in the corridor were of a white marble flecked with strange impurities, and in two places there was a low arch over which ran some bizarre carvings.Narrator
I knew that I was not as others; that there was a world outside, and that in truth I dwelt within a gulf of unreality and illusion; but such knowledge pained rather than pleased me, and I preferred to attribute the peculiarities of my environment to my own uniqueness rather than to fancy myself a figment of universal imagination.Narrator