Dracula
by Bram Stoker
(Peguin, 2012)
The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most Western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule.
Page 1.
In the midst of the Carpathian mountains, one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe.
Page 2.
Every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians, as if it were the centre of some sort of imaginative whirlpool.
Page 2.
It seemed to me that the further east you go the more unpunctual are the trains.
Pages 2-3.
What sort of place had I come to, and among what kind of people? What sort of grim adventure was it on which I had embarked?
Page 16.
Within, stood a tall old man, clean-shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere. He held in his hand an antique silver lamp, in which the flame burned without chimney or globe of any kind, throwing long quivering shadows as it flickered in the draught of the open door. The old man motioned me in with is right hand with a courtly gesture, saying in excellent English, but with a strange intonation: - “Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will!”
Page 17.
“Welcome to my house. Come freely. Go safely; and leave something of the happiness you bring!”
Page 18.
His face was a strong - a very strong - aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead, and long hair growing scantily round the temples, but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale and at the tops extremely pointed; the chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.
Pages 19-20.
Strange to say, there were hairs in the centre of the palm. The nails were long and fine, and cut to a sharp point.
Page 20.
In none of the rooms is there a mirror. There is not even a toilet-glass on my table.
Page 21.
“A house cannot be made habitable in a day; and, after all, how few days go to make up a century. … I seek not gaiety nor mirth, or the bright voluptuousness of much sunshine and sparkling waters which please the young and gay.”
Page 26.
“I love the shade and the shadow, and would be alone with my thoughts when I may.”
Page 27.
There is something so strange about this place and all in it that I cannot but feel uneasy. … If there were anyone to talk to I could bear it, but there is no one. I have only the count to speak with, and he! - I fear I am myself the only living soul within the place.
Page 28.
Having answered the Count’s salutation, I turned to the glass again to see how I had been mistaken. This time there could be no error, for the man was close to me, and I could see him over my shoulder. But there was no reflection of hi in the mirror! The whole room behind me was displayed; but there was no sign of a man in it, except myself.
Pages 28-29.
It is strange that as yet I have not seen the Count eat or drink.
Page 29.
Doors, doors, doors everywhere, and all locked and bolted. In no place save from the windows in the castle walls is there an available exit.
The castle is a veritable prison, and I am a prisoner!
Page 30.
It is wonderful how small a matter will interest and amuse a man when he is a prisoner.
Page 39.
The castle was built on the corner of a great rock, so that on three sides it was quite impregnable, and great windows were placed here where sling, or bow, or culverin could not reach, and consequently light and comfort, impossible to a position which had to be guarded, were secured.
Page 40.
It is nineteenth century pu-to-date with a vengeance. And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill.
Page 41.
Safety and the assurance of safety are things of the past.
Page 41.
No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and how dear to his heart and eye the morning can be.
Page 52.
It has always been at night-time that I have been molested or threatened, or in some way in danger or in fear. I have not yet seen the Count in the daylight. Can it be that he sleeps when others wake, that he may be awake whilst they sleep
Page 53.
There, in one of the great boxes, of which there were fifty in all, on a pile of newly dug earth, lay the Count! He was either dead or asleep, I could not say which - for the eyes were open and stony, but without the glassiness of death - and the cheeks had the warmth of life through all their pallor, and the lips were as red as ever. But there was no sign of movement, no pulse, no breath, no beating of the heart.
Page 55.
The last I saw of Count Dracula was his kissing his hand to me; with a red light of triumph in his eyes, and with a smile that Judas in hell might be proud of.
Page 57.
It seemed as if the whole awful creature were simply gorged with blood; he lay like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion.
Page 59.
Being proposed to is all very nice and all that sort of thing, but it isn’t at all a happy thing when you have to see a poor fellow, whom you know loves you honestly going away and looking all brokenhearted, and to know that, no matter what he may say at the moment, you are passing quite out of his life.
Page 66.
I feel so miserable, though I am happy.
Page 66.
I suppose that we women are such cowards that we think a man will save us from fears, and we marry him.
Page 67.
My homicidal maniac is of a peculiar kind. I shall have to invent a new classification for him, and call him a zoophagous (life-eating) maniac; what he desires is to absorb as many lives as he can, and he has laid himself out to achieve it in a cumulative way.
Page 82.
How well the man reasoned; lunatics always do within their own scope.
Page 83.
“For life be, after all, only a waitin’ for somethin’ else than what we’re doin’; and death be all that we can rightly depend on.”
Page 86.
“Look! Look!” he cried suddenly. “There’s something in that wind and in the hoast beyond that sounds, and looks, and tastes, and smells like death. It’s in the air; I feel it comin’.”
Pages 86-87.
I looked at her throat just now as she lay asleep and the tiny wounds seem not to have healed, They are still open, and, if anything, larger than before, and the edges of them are faintly white. They are like little white dots with red centres.
Page 111.
The real God taketh heed lest a sparrow fall; but the God created from human vanity sees no difference between an eagle and a sparrow.
Page 117.
Bats usually wheel and flit about, but this one seemed to go straight on, as if it knew where it was bound for or had some intention of its own.
Page 126.
All men are mad in some way or the other.
Page 138.
We learn from failure, not from success!
Page 139.
Death has some antidote to its own terrors.
Page 139.
No man knows till he experience it, what it is to feel his own life-blood drawn away into the veins of the woman he loves.
Page 148.
We must obey, and silence is a part of obedience.
Page 151.
How blessed are some people, whose lives have no fears, no dreads; to whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly, and brings nothing but sweet dreams.
Page 154.
You must not be alone; for to be alone is to be full of fears and alarms.
Page 184.
Her teeth, in the dim, uncertain light, seemed longer and sharper than they had been in the morning. In particular, by some trick of the light, the canine teeth looked longer and sharper than the rest.
Page 185.
He laughed till he cried, and I had to draw down the blinds lest anyone should see us and misjudge; and then he cried till he laughed again; and laughed and cried, together, just as a woman does. I tried to be stern with him, as one is to a woman under the circumstances; but it had no effect. Men and women are so different in manifestations of nervous strength or weakness!
Page 202.
“You have a good memory for fats, for details? It is not always so with young ladies.”
Page 212.
Trust cannot be where there is mean nature.
Page 213.
It is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all: and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain. But yet we see around us every day the growth of new beliefs, which think themselves new; and which are yet but the old, which pretend to be young.
Page 221.
“I shall cut off her head and fill her mouth with garlic, and I shall drive a stake through her body.”
Page 233.
In Many ways the Un-Dead are strong. He have always the strength in his hand of twenty men … he can summon his wolf and I know not what.
Page 235.
Find this great Un-Dead, and cut off his head and butn his heart or drive a stake through it, so that the world may rest from him.
Page 336.
Is it possible that the Professor can have done it himself? He is so abnormally clever that if he went off his head he would carry out his intent with regard to some fixed idea in a wonderful way.
Page 336.
At sundown the Un-Dead can move.
Page 242.
Never did tombs look so ghastly white; never did cypress, or yew, or juniper so seem the embodiment of funeral gloom; never did tree or grass wave or rustle so ominously; never did bough creak so mysteriously; and never did the far-away howling of dogs send such a woeful presage through the night.
Page 244.
We all looked on in horrified amazement as we saw, when he stood back, the woman, with a corporeal body as real at the moment as our own, pass in through the interstice where scare a knife-blade could have gone.
Page 246.
When they become such, there comes with the change the curse of immortality; they cannot die, but must go on age after age adding new victims and multiplying the evils of the world: for all that die from the preying of the Un-Dead become themselves Un-Dead, and prey on their kind. And so the circle goes on ever widening, like as ripples from a stone thrown int eh water.
Pages 248-249.
‘Nosferatu’, as they call it in Eastern Europe.
Page 249.
If she die in truth, then all cease; the tiny wounds of the throats disappear, and they go back to their plays unknowing ever of what has been. But of the most blessed of all, when this now Un-Dead be made to rest as true dead, then the soul of the poor lady whom we love shall again be free. Instead of working wickedness by night and growing more debased in the assimilation of it by day, she shall take her place with the other Angels. So that, my friend, it will be a blessed hand for her that shall strike the blow that sets her free.
Page 249.
The Thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions; the sharp white teeth champed together tilt he lips were cut, and the mouth was smeared with a crimson foam.
Page 250.
The Professor and I sawed the top off the stake, leaving the point of it in the body. Then we cut off the head and filled the mouth with garlic.
Page 252.
The world seems full of good men - even if there are monsters in it.
Pages 260-261.
There is something in woman’s nature that makes a man free to break down before her and express his feelings on the tender or emotional side without feeling it derogatory to his manhood.
Page 267.
We women have something of the mother in us that makes us rise above smaller matters when the mother-spirit is invoked.
Page 267.
No one but a woman an help a man when he is in trouble of the heart.
Page 268.
Easiness is one of the qualities mad people most respect.
Page 271.
I used to fancy that life was a positive and perpetual entity, and that by consuming a multitude of live things, no matter how low in the scale of creation, one might indefinitely prolong life. At times I held the belief so strongly that I actually tried to take human life. The doctor here will bear me out that on one occasion I tried to kill him for the purpose of strengthening my vital powers by the assimilation with my own body of his life through the medium of his blood - relying, of course, upon the Scriptural phrase, “For the blood is the life.”
Page 272.
That wonderful Madam Mina! She has man’s brain - a brain that a man should have were he much gifted - and woman’s heart.
Page 273.
The vampire which is among us is of himself so strong in person as twenty men; he is of cunning more than mortal, for his cunning be the growth of ages; he have still the aids of necromancy, which is, as his etymology imply, the divination of the dead, and all the dead that he can come night to are for him at command; he is brute, and more than brute: he is devil in callous, and the heart of him is not; he can, within limitations, appear at will when, and where, and in any of the forms that are to him; he can, within his range, direct the elements the storm, the fog, the thunder; he can command all the meaner things: the rat, and the owl, and the bat - the moth, and the fox, and the wolf; he can grow and become small; and he can at times vanish and come unknown.
Page 276.
We have on our side power of combination - a power denied to the vampire kind; we have resources of science; we are free to act and think; and the hours of the day and the night are ours equally. In fact, so far as our powers extend, they are unfettered, and we are free to use them. We have self-devotion in a cause, and an end to achieve, which is not a selfish one. These things are much.
Page 277.
The vampire live on, and cannot die by mere passing of the time; he can flourish when that he can fatten on the blood of the living. Even more, we have seen among us that he can even g row younger; that his vital faculties grow strenuous, and seem as though they refresh themselves when his special pabulum is plenty. … He throws no shadow; he make in the mirror no reflect.
Page 278.
He can transform himself to wolf, as we gather from the ship arrival in Whitby, when he tear open the dog; he can be as bat, as Madam Mina saw him on the window at Whitby … He can come in mist which he create - that noble ship’s captain proved him of this; but, from what we know, the distance he can make this mist is limited, and it can only be round himself. He come on moonlight rays as elemental dust.
Page 279.
He can, when once he find his way, come out from anything or into anything, no matter how close it be bound or even fused up with fire - solder you call it. He can see in the dark.
Page 279.
He cannot go where he lists; he who is not of nature has yet to obey some of nature’s laws - why we know not. He may not enter anywhere at the first, unless there be someone of the household who bid him to come …His power ceases, as does that of all evil things, at the coming of the day.
Page 279.
The branch of wild rose on his coffin keep him that he move not from it; a sacred bullet fired into the coffin kill him so that he be true dead, and as for the stake through him, we know already of its peace; the cut-off head that giveth rest.
Page 280.
Manlike, they have told me to go to bed and sleep; as if a woman can sleep when those she loges are in danger!
Page 282.
I shall put a bold face on, and if I do feel weepy, he shall never see it. I suppose it is one of the lessons that we poor women have to learn.
Page 300.
Not a thing seemed to be stirring, but all to be grim and fixed as death or fate; so that a thin streak of white mist, that crept with almost imperceptible slowness across the grass towards the house, seemed to have a sentience and a vitality of its own.
Page 300.
I want to think and I cannot think when my body is confined.
Page 317.
It is too bad that men cannot be trusted unless they are watched.
Page 319.
We must sterilize all the imported earth between sunrise and sunset; we shall thus catch the Count at his weakest, and without a refuge to fly to.
Page 319.
As we burst into the room, the Count turned his face, and the hellish look that I had heard described seemed to leap into it. His eyes flamed red with devilish passion; the great nostrils of the white aquiline nose opened wide and quivered at the edge; and the white sharp teeth, behind the full lips of the blood-dripping mouth, champed together like those of a wild beast.
Page 329.
He jumped from the bed, and began to pull on his clothes, all the man in him awake at the need for instant exertion.
Page 331.
He will not be back tonight; for the sky is reddening in the east, and the dawn is close.
Page 333.
The sun that rose on our sorrow this morning guards us in its course. Until it sets tonight, that monster must retain whatever form he now has. He is confined within the limitations of his earthly envelope. He cannot melt into thin air nor disappear through cracks or chinks or crannies. If he go through a doorway, he must open the door like a mortal.
Page 340.
There are many belongings that he must have; why not in this place so central, so quiet, where he come and go by the front or the back at all hours, when in the very vast of the traffic there is none to take notice.
Page 341.
He was in life a most wonderful man. Soldier, statesman, and alchemist - which latter was the highest development of the science-knowledge of his time. He had a mighty brain, a learning beyond compare, and a heart that knew no fear and no remorse. He dared even to attend the Scholomance, and there was no branch of knowledge of his time that he did not essay. Well, in him, the brain powers survived the physical death; though it would seem that memory was not all complete.
Pages 351-352.
He is experimenting, and doing it well.
Page 352.
Your Vampire, though in all afterwards he can come when and how he will, must at first make entry only when asked thereto by an inmate.
Page 352.
That poor soul who has wrought all this misery is the saddest case of all. Just think what will be his joy when he too is destroyed in his worser part that his better part may have spiritual immortality. You must be pitiful to him too, though it may not hold your hands from his destruction.
Page 359.
He know that his game here was finish; and so he decide he go back home. He find ship going by the route he came, and he go in it.
Page 366.
This very creature that we pursue, he take hundreds of years to get so far as London; and yet in one day, when we know of the disposal of him we drive him out. He is finite, though he is powerful to do much harm and suffers not as we do.
Pages 366-367.
The measure of leaving his own barren land - barren of peoples - and coming to a new land where life of man teems till they are like the multitude of standing corn, was the work of centuries. Were another of the Un-Dead, like him, to try to do what he has done, perhaps not all the centuries of the world that have been, or that will be, could aid him. With this one, all the forces of nature that are occult and deep and strong must have worked together in some wondrous way.
Page 371.
In a hard and warlike time he was celebrate that he have more iron nerve, more subtle brain, more braver heart, than any man. In him some vital principle have in strange way found their utmost; and as his body keep strong and grow and thrive, so his brain grow too.
Page 372.
From a ruin tomb in a forgotten land. What more may he not do when the greater world of thought is open to him.
Page 373.
Our toil must be in silence, and our efforts all in secret; for in this enlightened age, when men believe not even what they see, the doubting of wise men would be his greatest strength.
Page 373.
It is really wonderful how much resilience there is a in human nature.
Page 374.
To superstition must we trust at the first; it was man’s faith in the early, and it have its root in faith still.
Page 381.
The Count, even if he takes the form of a bat, cannot cross the running water of his own volition, and so cannot leave the ship.
Page 388.
‘Euthanasia’ is an excellent and a comforting word! I am grateful to whoever invented it.
Page 391.
Transcendentalism is a beacon to the angels, even if it be a will-o’-the-wisp to man.
Page 393.
I have hope that our man-brains that have been of man so long and that have not lost the grace of God, will come higher than his child-brain that lie in his tomb for centuries, that grow not yet to our stature, and that do only work selfish and therefore small.
Page 395.
He came to London to invade a new land. He was beaten, and when all hope of success was lost, and his existence in danger, he fled back over the sea to his home; just as formerly he had fled back over the Danube from turkey-land.
Page 397.
As he is criminal he is selfish; and as his intellect is small and his action based on selfishness, he confines himself to one purpose. That purpose is remorseless. As he fled back over the Danube, leaving his forces to be cut to pieces, so now he is intent on being safe, careless of all.
Page 398.
He must be brought back by someone. This is evident: for had he power to move himself as he wished he could go either as man, or wolf, or bat, or in some other way. He evidently fears discovery or interference, in the state of helplessness in which he must be - confined as he is between dawn and sunset in his wooden box.
Page 408.
On the water he is powerless except at night; even then he can only summon fog and storm and snow and his wolves. But were he wrecked, the living water would engulf him, helpless.
Page 409.
We shall not rest until the Count’s head and body have been separated, and we are sure that he cannot reincarnate.
Page 412.
How can women help loving men when they are so earnest, and so true, and so brave!
Page 414.
It made me think of the wonderful power of money! What can it not do when it is properly applied; might it do when basely used. I felt so thankful that Lord Godalming is rich, and that both he and Mr. Morris, who also has plenty of money, are willing to spend it so freely. For if they did not, our little expedition could not start, either so promptly or so well equipped.
Page 414.
The weather is getting colder every hour, and there are snow-flurries which come and go as warnings.
Page 414.
The maw of the wolf were better to rest in than the grave of the Vampire! So I make my choice to go on with my work.
Page 430.
I doubt not that in old time, when such things were, many a man who set forth to do such a task as mine, found at the last his heart fail him, and then his nerve. So he delay, and delay, and delay, till the mere beauty and the fascination of the wanton Un-dead have hypnotize him; and he remain on, and on, till sunset come, and the Vampire sleep be over. Then the beautiful eyes of the fair woman open and look love, and the voluptuous mouth present to a kiss - and man is weak. And there remain one more victim in the Vampire fold; one more to swell the grim and grisly ranks of the Un-dead!
Page 430.
Hardly had my knife severed the head of each, before the whole body began to melt away and crumble into its native dust, as though the death that should have come centuries agone had at last assert himself and say at once and loud ‘I am here!’
Page 432.
We looked back and saw where the clear line of Dracula’s castle cut the sky; for we were so deep under the hill whereon it was set that the angle of perspective of the Carpathian mountains was far below it. We saw it in all its grandeur, perched a thousand feet on the summit of a sheer precipice, and with seemingly a great gap between it and the steep of the adjacent mountain on any side. There was something wild and uncanny about the place. We could hear the distant howling of wolves. They were far off, but the sound, even though coming muffled through the deadening snowfall, was full of terror.
Page 433.
I saw the Count lying within the box upon the earth, some of which the rude falling from the cart had scattered over him. He was deathly pale, just like a waxen image, and the red eyes glared with the horrible vindictive look which I knew too well.
Page 438.
It was like a miracle; but before our very eyes, and almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight.
Page 438.
Superstitions about vampires - which are found in cultures as remote from Transylvania as China - originate not in the epic misdeeds of Vlad the Impaler, but in the behavior of the human corpse after death. The dead body is not inert, but a veritable hothouse of chemical and physiological activities. It moves, makes noises, and excretes fluids. This post-mortem activity … is rationalized by primitive peoples into the vampire (or ‘undead’) myth.
Page 441.
Like Well’s Martians (which also sent shivers down English spines in 1897), Stoker’s monstrous vampire is a deadly and alien invader, bent on destroying England’s green and pleasant land (both the Martians and Dracula support themselves on a diet of English blood, interestingly enough).
Page 442.
During the day he is obliged to take a mundane, human form, and his wings are correspondingly clipped. But he is quite capable of moving around by daylight with the freedom of any other gentleman.
Page 442.
The key to reading Dracula and recovering Stoker’s artistic intention is, I would suggest, close attention to te large number of spikily contemporary references in the text of recent gadgetry, communications technology, and scientific innovation.
Page 443.
On his part, Dracula hates modernity. … What this means is that in the struggle between Van Helsing and Dracula, we have a contest between the ‘pagan world of old’ and ‘modernity’. A demon from the Dark Ages pitted against men of the 1890s armed with Winchester rifles, telegrams, phonographs, modern medicine and science.
Page 443.
In Transylvania Dracula is apparently careful about propagating his kind, keeping his retinue of undead companions to a handful. But in England his promiscuity triggers off a potential infectious epidemic.
Page 444.
The reason for Dracula’s coning to England is divulged late in the narrative by Van Helsing. … Dracula … is learning how to think scientifically.
Page 445.
Dracula, we apprehend, has chosen England because it is the most modern country in the world - the most modern, that is, in its social organization, its industry, its education, its science. Put in its most banal form, he was come to England to learn how to luse the Kodak, how to write shorthand, and how to operate the recording phonograph in order that he may make himself a thoroughly modern vampire for the imminent twentieth century.
Page 445.