Key Quotes and Extracts from whole novel
Below are key quotes that show Hyde's descent into darkness.
Below that is a handy table with key quotes from the whole novel.
Creative responses
Choose at least one of these tasks to help you empathise with the character, make a personal response and help you to remember the quotes for the essay/exam.
For NCEA, choice #2 can form part of your Creative Writing Portfolio (3 or 6 credits, depending on your year level) of for GCSE/A Level, you can use this for a creative writing submission.
1) Poetry/stream of consciousness
choose 10+ quotes and use them to do the 'Bowie Method' of poetry - 'randomly selected' quotes that hit you for some reason, re-arranged into a poem about someone's inner struggle. Add your own phrases and ideas too.
2) narrative/character voice
use 3-5 of the quotes within your story to structure your narrative and show the character's fall.
Below are key quotes that show Hyde's descent into darkness.
Below that is a handy table with key quotes from the whole novel.
Creative responses
Choose at least one of these tasks to help you empathise with the character, make a personal response and help you to remember the quotes for the essay/exam.
For NCEA, choice #2 can form part of your Creative Writing Portfolio (3 or 6 credits, depending on your year level) of for GCSE/A Level, you can use this for a creative writing submission.
1) Poetry/stream of consciousness
choose 10+ quotes and use them to do the 'Bowie Method' of poetry - 'randomly selected' quotes that hit you for some reason, re-arranged into a poem about someone's inner struggle. Add your own phrases and ideas too.
2) narrative/character voice
use 3-5 of the quotes within your story to structure your narrative and show the character's fall.
- I concealed my pleasures
- A profound duplicity of life
- Severed in me…good and ill which divide[s] and compound[s] a man’s nature
- Man is not truly one but truly two
- Primitive duality of man
- The curse of mankind
- Agonized womb of consciousness
- Polar twins…struggling
- Mist-like transience
- One accursed night
- Evil…had left on that body an imprint of deformity and decay
- It seemed natural and human
- I had come to the fatal cross roads
- From these agonies of death and birth I had come forth an angel instead of a fiend [he is talking about his decision to take the potion and that he – Jekyll – saw nothing inherently evil about it]
- I fell in slavery
- Doff…the body of the professor and assume like a thick cloak…Edward Hyde
- In my impenetrable mantle…my safety was complete
- Edward Hyde would pass away like the stain of breath upon a mirror
- Pleasures…undignified…in the hands of Edward Hyde they soon began to turn…monstrous
- Vicarious depravity
- Inherently malign and villainous
- Drinking pleasure with bestial avidity
- Henry Jekyll stood at times aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde
- But Insidiously relaxed the grasp of conscience
- Conscience slumbered
- I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self
- Jekyll… now with a greedy gusto projected and shared in the pleasures and adventures of Hyde
- While Jekyll would suffer smartingly in the fires of abstinence, Hyde would not even be conscious of all that he had lost.
- As it falls with so vast a majority of my fellows…I chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it.
- My devil had long been caged, he came out roaring.
- I had voluntarily stripped myself of all those balancing instincts, by which even the worst of us continues to walk with some degree of steadiness among temptations
- I mauled the unresisting body…tasting delight from every blow
- Struck through the heart by a cold thrill of terror
- A divided ecstasy of mind
- I was glad to have my better instincts buttressed and guarded by the terrors of the scaffold. Jekyll was now my city of refuge.
- The lower side of me…so recently chained down began to howl for license
- It was an ordinary secret sinner that I at last fell before the assaults of temptation
- The fall seemed natural
- I smiled, comparing myself with other men, comparing their active goodwill with the lazy cruelty of their neglect
- I was…thrall to the gallows
- He, I say – I cannot say, I. That child of Hell had nothing human; nothing lived in him but fear and hatred.
- I still hated and feared the thought of the brute that slept within me
- Only under the immediate stimulation of the drug, I was able to wear the countenance of Jekyll.
- A creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self
- [Hyde had] A soul boiling with causeless hatreds and a body that seemed not strong enough to contain the raging energies of life
- When I know how he fears my power to cut him off by suicide, I find it in my heart to pity him
- [Hyde] has finally severed me from my own face and nature
- His apelike spite
- The doom that is closing in on us both, has already changed and crushed him
- I shall sit shuddering and weeping in my chair
- This is my true hour of death
- Seal up my confession…bring the life of that unhappy Jekyll to an end