Carmilla quotes

You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish. How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me and still come with me. and hating me through death and after. There is no such word as indifference in my apathetic nature.

“I have been in love with no one, and never shall,” she whispered, “unless it should be with you.”

— Spoken by a character · V. A Wonderful Likeness

“Darling, darling,” she murmured, “I live in you; and you would die for me, I love you so.”

— Spoken by a character · V. A Wonderful Likeness

“You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one for ever.”

— Spoken by a character · IV. Her Habits—A Saunter

Love will have its sacrifices. No sacrifice without blood.

— Spoken by a character · VI. A Very Strange Agony

Dearest, your little heart is wounded; think me not cruel because I obey the irresistible law of my strength and weakness; if your dear heart is wounded, my wild heart bleeds with yours.

— Spoken by a character · IV. Her Habits—A Saunter

Girls are caterpillars while they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime there are grubs and larvae, don’t you see—each with their peculiar propensities, necessities and structure.

But to die as lovers may—to die together, so that they may live together.

— Spoken by a character · IV. Her Habits—A Saunter

But dreams come through stone walls, light up dark rooms, or darken light ones, and their persons make their exits and their entrances as they please, and laugh at locksmiths.

“Nevertheless life and death are mysterious states, and we know little of the resources of either.”

— Spoken by a character · IV. Her Habits—A Saunter

For some nights I slept profoundly; but still every morning I felt the same lassitude, and a languor weighed upon me all day. I felt myself a changed girl. A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted.

But curiosity is a restless and unscrupulous passion, and no one girl can endure, with patience, that hers should be baffled by another.

If human testimony, taken with every care and solemnity, judicially, before commissions innumerable, each consisting of many members, all chosen for integrity and intelligence, and constituting reports more voluminous perhaps than exist upon any one other class of cases, is worth anything, it is difficult to deny, or even to doubt the existence of such a phenomenon as the Vampire.

It was long before the terror of recent events subsided; and to this hour the image of Carmilla returns to memory with ambiguous alternations—sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church; and often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing room door.

Young people like, and even love, on impulse.

I wonder whether you feel as strangely drawn towards me as I do to you; I have never had a friend—shall I find one now?

— Spoken by a character · III. We Compare Notes