Thomas De Quincey Quotes: Sources, Meanings & Themes
Browse quotations by Thomas De Quincey with named works, context notes, meanings and recurring themes.
Source identified1
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“years that were far asunder were bound together by subtle links of suffering derived from a common root.”
Meaning & context
De Quincey describes how pain separated by many years can still feel connected when later suffering grows from an earlier unresolved source.
Source details
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, from the autobiographical narrative first published in the London Magazine in 1821 and represented by Project Gutenberg #2040. The passage belongs to De Quincey’s historical life-writing around opium use and suffering; it is not medical guidance about addiction or trauma.
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“For if once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing;”
Meaning & context
De Quincey parodies moral slippery-slope arguments by absurdly treating murder as the first step toward increasingly ordinary vices such as robbery, drinking and procrastination.
Source details
Second Paper on Murder (1839), represented in Project Gutenberg #10708 under the Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts sequence. The passage is deliberate black comedy and satire; it does not endorse violence or present a serious behavioral progression.
Source identified3
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“The moments were numbered; the strife was finished; the vision was closed.”
Meaning & context
The compressed sentence captures the instant in which a terrifying encounter becomes irreversible memory, emphasizing how abruptly danger can pass into recollection.
Source details
The English Mail-Coach, represented by Project Gutenberg #6359 in the volume The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc. The sentence follows the near-collision / dream-fugue sequence and is highly literary first-person prose, not an objective report of measured time.