GCSE and A level English Literature
Frankenstein quotes by chapter, character and theme
These are key Frankenstein quotes for GCSE and A level, arranged by letter and chapter, and checked word for word against Mary Shelley's 1831 text.
There are 38. Each one gives the letter or chapter, who is speaking, a sentence of what is happening, and a short note on how you might use the line. The character and theme buttons are the index. Characters: Robert Walton, Victor Frankenstein, the creature, M. Waldman and Justine Moritz. Themes: ambition, science, creation, isolation, revenge, justice, nature and responsibility. Filters narrow the list. The quotations stay in book order underneath.
Source: Frankenstein, Project Gutenberg eBook 84 (1831 text). The wording is the Project Gutenberg text of Frankenstein, eBook 84. That file follows the 1831 revision: Walton's four letters, then twenty-four chapters numbered straight through, with no volume divisions. Elizabeth is introduced as the daughter of a Milanese nobleman, found with a peasant family by Lake Como, which is the 1831 account. In the 1818 text she is the daughter of Victor's father's sister. Later in the same file Victor still calls her his cousin when the wedding date is fixed, so do not tidy that word if your copy has it. After the lightning strikes the oak, the 1831 text has a man of great research in natural philosophy explain electricity and galvanism; in 1818 it is Victor's father. The file includes neither Shelley's 1831 introduction nor the 1818 preface. The 1818 first edition was printed in three volumes, with the chapter count starting again in each one. AQA's GCSE specification (8702) lists the novel as Frankenstein (1831). Pearson Edexcel (1ET0) lists Frankenstein and prescribes no edition, because its exam is closed book. OCR's GCSE (J352) list does not include it. Gutenberg marks italics with underscores; those marks are not words, so they are not shown here. Sentences in the file that contain an em dash are left out, so every line below can be checked without that mark.
Other GCSE hubs on this site: A Christmas Carol quotes, Jekyll and Hyde quotes, Macbeth quotes, Pride and Prejudice quotes and Jane Eyre quotes.
Part
Character
Theme
Showing 38 of 38
Letter 1
You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.
Letter 1 · Robert Walton
The first sentence of Letter 1, written to his sister, Margaret Saville, from St Petersburgh on 11 December. The voyage north has only just begun. He is telling her that her fears have not come true yet.
The enterprise is still a success in his mind, which is why the line belongs with Victor's workshop and not with the wreck at the end. The date line above it in the file uses a dash. This sentence does not.
I shall satiate my ardent curiosity with the sight of a part of the world never before visited, and may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man.
Letter 1 · Robert Walton
Still Letter 1, still to his sister. He has been imagining the country of eternal light, and what the voyage might do for science. These are the enticements, he says, that conquer his fear of danger or death.
"Satiate" and "never before" make the north a private conquest. Put it beside the creature's last journey to the same ice, where there is nothing left to discover except a funeral.
Letter 4
One man’s life or death were but a small price to pay for the acquirement of the knowledge which I sought, for the dominion I should acquire and transmit over the elemental foes of our race.
Letter 4 · Robert Walton
Letter 4, written to Margaret, but the words were spoken to Victor. Walton has been describing the burning wish behind the voyage. As he speaks, gloom spreads over Victor's face. Victor is the listener. The sister only reads the report.
The small price is someone else's life. By the time Walton says it, William, Justine, Clerval and Elizabeth are already dead, though Walton does not yet know their names. The letter records only the gloom on Victor's face. The apostrophe in man's is the curly one printed in this file.
Chapter 2
The world was to me a secret which I desired to divine.
Chapter 2 · Victor Frankenstein
Victor is telling Walton about childhood at home with Elizabeth. She is content to admire the mountains and the seasons. He wants the causes. This sentence is his, in that contrast. He is not saying it to Elizabeth at the time.
"Divine" here means to discover, not to worship. The line is the boy's version of Walton's voyage. It is still innocent, which is why it should not be quoted as if he were already in the charnel house.
I was capable of a more intense application and was more deeply smitten with the thirst for knowledge.
Chapter 2 · Victor Frankenstein
The same recollection of childhood. Victor has just said Elizabeth was calmer and more concentrated. He is measuring his own mind against hers, for Walton. The sentence about Alpine summers, which follows, is about her.
The thirst is a compliment he pays himself. Elizabeth gets the poets. He gets application. An essay on gendered knowledge can start from that split, before Ingolstadt makes it dangerous.
the oak had disappeared, and nothing remained but a blasted stump. When we visited it the next morning, we found the tree shattered in a singular manner. It was not splintered by the shock, but entirely reduced to thin ribbons of wood.
Chapter 2 · Victor Frankenstein
Victor is a boy, standing at the door during a thunderstorm. A stream of fire strikes an old oak about twenty yards from the house. The "the" has no capital because the sentence has already begun. A man of great research in natural philosophy is with the family, and he explains electricity and galvanism, which throws Agrippa into the shade. The oak is in the 1818 text too, but there Victor's father explains electricity.
The tree is not a metaphor Victor intends. It is a demonstration that natural force can unmake a solid thing in a moment. If your edition is 1818, the oak is there, but the person who explains it is different.
Chapter 3
“The ancient teachers of this science,” said he, “promised impossibilities and performed nothing.
Chapter 3 · M. Waldman
Waldman's chemistry lecture at Ingolstadt, which Victor attends after M. Krempe has dismissed his alchemists. Waldman says this to the room. Victor is in the audience. The speech goes on to the modern masters and their microscopes. There is no closing quotation mark yet, because he has not finished.
The old teachers promised the elixir and the transmutation of metals. Waldman says they performed nothing, then credits the moderns with real power, including command of the thunder. Victor hears a permission, not a caution.
more, far more, will I achieve; treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.
Chapter 3 · Victor Frankenstein
The night of Waldman's lecture. Victor does not say this aloud. The file prints "So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein" and then a dash, which is not copied here. These are the words that follow that dash. He does not close his eyes that night.
"Already marked" means he thinks he is only walking further down a path the modern chemists opened. The creation is still a future boast. Keep the semicolon after "achieve".
Chapter 4
Whence, I often asked myself, did the principle of life proceed?
Chapter 4 · Victor Frankenstein
Victor is telling Walton how the work began. He had been studying the structure of any animal endued with life. He asked himself this. It is not a question put to Waldman or to his father.
He calls it a bold question and a mystery, then decides that cowardice is the only thing restraining the enquirer. The line is the turn from chemistry lectures to the body.
To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death.
Chapter 4 · Victor Frankenstein
Immediately after he has decided to pursue physiology. He tells Walton that anatomy was not enough, so he had to watch decay. His father, he says, had tried to keep supernatural horrors out of his education. This sentence is Victor's own conclusion, not a lesson he was taught.
The pursuit of life is redescribed as a visit to corruption. That is the moral irony before any creature stands up. Do not move the line to the night of the animation. He is still preparing.
Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.
Chapter 4 · Victor Frankenstein
He has spent months collecting materials and has begun the work. He is alone with it. He tells Walton that in the first enthusiasm no one could conceive the feelings that bore him on. A new species, he thought, would bless him as its creator.
"Ideal bounds" means he treats a limit as a line he is allowed to cross. The blessing he expects is gratitude. The next chapter gives him the eye, and the gratitude does not come.
Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.
Chapter 4 · Victor Frankenstein
Victor breaks off the story of the discovery and speaks directly to Walton. He can see eagerness and hope in Walton's eyes. He refuses to share the secret, and he says this so that Walton will not be led on as he was.
The warning sits in the middle of the telling, before the creature has even opened its eye in the narrative. Victor already knows the end. Walton is the student who may not take the lesson, which is why Letter 4 still talks of dominion.
A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquillity.
Chapter 4 · Victor Frankenstein
Still to Walton, while explaining the months he ignored his family. He says he now agrees that his father was right to blame the neglect. Then he states this rule, and he applies it to Walton's own studies. If a study weakens the affections, he says, it is unlawful.
In this text the sentence is Victor's, spoken in hindsight. It is not a letter from Alphonse sitting on the page at this moment. His father is the standard he failed, not the voice in the room.
Chapter 5
It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.
Chapter 5 · Victor Frankenstein
The workshop in Ingolstadt, about one in the morning. Rain is against the panes and the candle is nearly burnt out. He is alone. The creature is still the "lifeless thing" at his feet. The eye has not opened yet.
"Spark of being" is as close as this text comes to naming the method. He does not give Walton the secret itself. The sentence is exhaustion and ceremony at once. Keep "dreary night of November" with the instruments, or the line becomes a weather report.
I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.
Chapter 5 · Victor Frankenstein
The next moment on that November night. The half-extinguished candle is the only light. This is the first sign of life. Victor is the only witness. He has not yet described the skin and the hair.
The eye is dull, not bright. Whatever he planned as a triumph arrives as a convulsion. Start a creation paragraph here, and finish it with the horror that drives him out of the room.
Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set
Chapter 5 · Victor Frankenstein
Still the workshop, immediately after the eye opens. Victor is cataloguing the features he chose because he had wanted them beautiful. He is not speaking to the creature. The creature has not yet made a sound.
The sentence turns on "but". The beauty was his selection. The horror is the same body once it breathes. "Dun-white" and "watery" do more work than any later insult.
now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.
Chapter 5 · Victor Frankenstein
He has worked nearly two years for this, and given up rest and health. The dream was the living body. The "now" has no capital because the sentence has already begun. Unable to endure the sight, he rushes out of the room and paces his bed-chamber.
Disgust arrives at the moment of success, not after the murders. That is the responsibility problem in miniature: he leaves. The creature is awake in the room he has abandoned.
Chapter 7
nearly in the light of my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave, and forced to destroy all that was dear to me.
Chapter 7 · Victor Frankenstein
The night he learns William is dead. Out in the storm at Plainpalais he has seen the creature climb Mont Salève and decided, from that sight alone, that the creature murdered the child. He spends the rest of the night in the open. This is how he thinks of the being he cast among mankind. He has not yet gone home to his father. The "nearly" has no capital because the sentence has already begun.
"My own" does the work. He makes the creature an extension of himself, and he is already sure of the murder before any trial. Justine's chapter is what that certainty costs.
Chapter 8
I did confess, but I confessed a lie. I confessed, that I might obtain absolution; but now that falsehood lies heavier at my heart than all my other sins.
Chapter 8 · Justine Moritz
Justine is speaking to Elizabeth, after Elizabeth has said that nothing can shake her confidence except Justine's own confession. Justine has been condemned. She explains that she lied in the hope of absolution. Her confessor, she says, besieged her until she almost believed she was the monster he named.
The comma after the second "confessed" is in this text. She is not admitting the murder. She is admitting the confession. Victor hears the truth and still does not speak. That silence belongs in the same paragraph.
Chapter 10
I am thy creature, and I will be even mild and docile to my natural lord and king if thou wilt also perform thy part, the which thou owest me.
Chapter 10 · The creature
The first long meeting, on the mountain glacier. The creature has demanded a hearing. He tells Victor he is more powerful, but he will not set himself in opposition if Victor will do what he owes. Victor has been trying to attack him.
"Natural lord and king" offers obedience as a bargain, not as love already given. The condition is the whole sentence. Without "if thou wilt also perform thy part", it sounds like submission.
I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.
Chapter 10 · The creature
The same speech on the glacier, a few lines later. He has said "Remember that I am thy creature." He is talking to Victor, not reading Paradise Lost aloud. He says he is shut out from bliss everywhere, and that he has done no misdeed to deserve it.
Adam is the made being who was kept. The fallen angel is the one cast out. He claims both roles before he has told the story of the De Laceys, so the reader has not yet heard the murders he will later admit. At this moment he is arguing innocence.
I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.
Chapter 10 · The creature
Still the glacier, still this opening speech, immediately after the Adam sentence. He is telling Victor what he was and what he has become. He has not yet begun the tale of the hovel.
The semicolon is the argument: nature, then circumstance. Victor's disgust in Chapter 5 is the first misery, dealt before any crime. Use the line if you want that order, and do not let it cancel the murders he later names.
Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.
Chapter 10 · The creature
The next sentence of that same speech. He offers Victor the remedy. Victor answers "Begone! I will not hear you." The bargain is refused before the creature has explained what happiness would be. The companion is asked for later.
Virtue is presented as something Victor can restore by kindness. It puts the creator back in charge of the creature's morals. That is either justice or a threat, depending on the paragraph you are writing. The line itself is a promise.
Chapter 15
I was dependent on none and related to none.
Chapter 15 · The creature
The creature is telling Victor about his time in the hovel, after he has learned to read. He has Paradise Lost, Plutarch's Lives, and the Sorrows of Werter. He can follow the feelings in the books and in the cottage, and still cannot place himself. He asks who he is, what he is, and where he came from. This sentence is part of that private confusion, reported afterwards to Victor.
"Related" means kin, not a story he has heard. Adam had a maker who answered. He has a maker who left. The books make the lack sharper. They do not cause it.
Chapter 16
I am alone and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me.
Chapter 16 · The creature
Near the end of his tale. The De Laceys have driven him out. He has wandered to the mountains and found Victor. He says they may not part until Victor promises to comply. Then he says this, and tells Victor that the companion must be of the same species, and that Victor must create her.
The female creature is imagined as someone who cannot refuse him, because she will be as hated as he is. It is a plea and a specification. "Would not deny herself" is hope, not her consent. She does not exist yet.
Chapter 17
I am malicious because I am miserable.
Chapter 17 · The creature
The argument continues in the mountains. Victor has refused: he will not create another like the creature, whose joint wickedness might desolate the world. The creature says Victor is in the wrong, and that he would rather reason than threaten. This sentence is the reason he offers. He asks why he should pity man more than man pities him.
It answers "misery made me a fiend" with the motive still running. He does not say he is malicious by birth. He ties it to how he is treated, and he is looking at the man who left the workshop.
I will revenge my injuries; if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear, and chiefly towards you my arch-enemy, because my creator, do I swear inextinguishable hatred.
Chapter 17 · The creature
The same debate. He has said the human senses are a barrier no kindness from him can cross, and that he will not submit like a slave. He swears this at Victor. A fiendish rage animates him as he speaks. The companion has not been agreed.
Love and fear are the only two effects he thinks he can have. Victor is singled out as the arch-enemy because he is the creator, not because of a later battle. The wedding night has not been named yet.
I demand a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself
Chapter 17 · The creature
Still speaking to Victor in that mountain argument. He says that if even one being felt benevolence towards him, he would make peace with the whole kind. He calls the demand reasonable and moderate. He says the two of them would be monsters, cut off from the world, but attached to each other, and harmless.
"Hideous" is his condition for her, so that she will not belong to the world that refuses him. He is designing her isolation to match his own. There is no full stop in this extract because the sentence runs on.
Chapter 18
He was a being formed in the “very poetry of nature.”
Chapter 18 · Victor Frankenstein
Victor is remembering the journey along the Rhine with Clerval. He has just recalled Clerval's pleasure in the vines, the village and the mountain. "Even now", as he tells Walton, it delights him to record Clerval's words. Clerval is dead by the time of the telling. This sentence is Victor's praise of him, not a line Clerval speaks. The phrase "very poetry of nature" is already in quotation marks in the file.
Clerval is the friend who looks at the Rhine as Elizabeth once looked at the mountains, and who nurses Victor after the creation. The praise comes after that death is known to the narrator. It is an elegy inside the travel chapter.
Chapter 20
You are my creator, but I am your master; obey!
Chapter 20 · The creature
The workshop where Victor has been making the companion, in Scotland. Victor has destroyed that work and said, "I do break my promise." The creature has followed him from Switzerland, along the Rhine, through England and Scotland. He says this after telling Victor he has the power to make the light of day hateful.
The glacier bargain was obedience if Victor performed his part. Here the part has been broken, and the titles reverse. "Obey" is the new term. It is not the first meeting, and it is not said on the ship.
Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful.
Chapter 20 · The creature
The same confrontation, in the speech that follows the question about a mate. Victor has refused, and the creature warns that the bolt will fall. He says revenge is now dearer than light or food, and that Victor will curse the sun that gazes on his misery. Then this. In this text there is a comma after Beware, and no comma before "and".
Power, for him, comes from having nothing he is unwilling to lose. Learn the punctuation from the text: a comma after Beware, and none before "and".
I shall be with you on your wedding-night.
Chapter 20 · The creature
Still in that house, after Victor tells him to leave and says he is inexorable. The creature replies that it is well, he goes, but Victor should remember this. Victor starts forward and calls him villain. The creature escapes by boat. Later in the chapter Victor remembers the threat in different words: "I will be with you on your wedding-night."
Learn the line he speaks, which is "I shall". Victor hears it as a threat to his own life, and plans the wedding as if he were the one who will die. Elizabeth is the one in the room on the night itself. The misreading is the tragedy, so do not collapse "shall" into "will".
“Shall each man,” cried he, “find a wife for his bosom, and each beast have his mate, and I be alone?
Chapter 20 · The creature
Straight after Victor refuses again, in the same scene. Victor has asked whether he should set loose a dæmon whose delight is in death, and told him to begone. The creature gnashes his teeth and cries this. The speech tag "cried he" is in the file, between the two halves of the question.
The question puts men, beasts and himself in one scale. He is not asking for love inside human society. He is asking why every other creature is allowed a mate. The wedding-night threat is the next move when the answer is no.
Chapter 22
Great God! If for one instant I had thought what might be the hellish intention of my fiendish adversary, I would rather have banished myself for ever from my native country and wandered a friendless outcast over the earth than have consented to this miserable marriage.
Chapter 22 · Victor Frankenstein
Victor has just agreed with his father that the wedding will take place in ten days if Elizabeth consents. The file calls her his cousin in that sentence. He believes the creature means to kill him on the wedding night, and so he thinks the marriage will bring the danger onto himself. This cry is hindsight, told to Walton. He did not think it on the day he consented.
The point is the misreading. He was willing to die and unwilling to imagine that the threat was aimed at her. "Miserable marriage" is his later name for a day he had faced with a cheerful countenance.
Chapter 24
I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on.
Chapter 24 · The creature
On Walton's ship, after Victor's death. The creature is speaking to Walton. He has asked why Walton does not hate Felix, who drove him from the door, or the rustic who attacked him after he saved a child. Then he says this. Victor's body is in the cabin.
"Abortion" here means a being unfinished and rejected, not a medical confession. He uses it to Walton, the last human audience. The self-pity does not last uncorrected: the next speech admits the murders.
I have murdered the lovely and the helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept and grasped to death his throat who never injured me or any other living thing.
Chapter 24 · The creature
The same speech to Walton, a moment later. He says it is true that he is a wretch, and then he lists what he has done. The lovely and the helpless are the victims. The throat is the person who never injured him. He also says he has devoted his creator to misery. Victor is already dead.
This is the confession the glacier speech did not yet make. "Grasped to death his throat" is the word order in this text. Do not smooth it into "grasped his throat to death" unless your own copy prints it that way.
Seek happiness in tranquillity and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries.
Chapter 24 · Victor Frankenstein
Victor's last advice to Walton, on the ship, before he dies. He says the only happy hour he has had in years is this one, when he expects release. The beloved dead flit before him. He says farewell, and then this. His voice grows fainter. In the next breath he asks why he says it, because another may succeed where he was blasted.
The warning is real, and it is unstable. If you quote only the calm sentence, you miss the scientist who still cannot quite renounce the attempt. Walton has to hear both.
He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.
Chapter 24 · Robert Walton
The last sentence of the novel. The creature has told Walton he will burn himself on a funeral pile at the northern extremity, so that no one can learn from his remains how to make another. He springs from the cabin window onto the ice raft. Walton watches. There is no further report.
The narrator is Walton, not Victor, and not a moralising voice outside the letters. The creature is not seen to die. He is lost. That is as much certainty as the book allows.
Build your own quote bank from the copy you have marked
A printed list is a start. The bank that helps in an exam is the one you made from your own book: the line you underlined, and a note in your words about why it is there.
Finish the page before you pick up the phone. Photograph the marked lines, check every word against the print, and keep the letter or chapter with the sentence. Add a tag only when you would reach for it in a paragraph: ambition, isolation, responsibility.
BookQuotes is an iPhone app for that job. On capture it can detect the page number. You name your own markings, and collections and tags keep one theme together. It does not import Kindle highlights. The steps are written out in how to save quotes from physical books.
View BookQuotes on the App StoreQuestions students ask
What are the key quotes in Frankenstein?
There is no official list. A useful set follows the story rather than sitting in the creation scene alone. Take Walton's hunger for a land no one has trodden, Victor on breaking the bounds of life and death, the dull yellow eye, and the horror that fills him once the dream is finished. Then the creature: Adam and the fallen angel, misery that made him a fiend, and the demand for a companion. End with the wedding-night threat, the murders he admits to Walton, and Victor's warning to seek happiness in tranquillity. Learn the letter or chapter as well as the words.
Which Frankenstein quotes are about ambition?
Walton will sacrifice fortune, existence and hope, and calls one man's life a small price for knowledge. Victor, the night of Waldman's lecture, will pioneer a new way and unfold the deepest mysteries of creation. In the workshop, life and death look like bounds he can break. The counter-weight is his own warning to Walton: learn from his example how dangerous the acquirement of knowledge is, and, at the end, seek happiness in tranquillity and avoid ambition. He then half takes the warning back, and says another may succeed. Quote both parts.
Which quotes fit isolation, revenge and the creator's responsibility?
Isolation: the creature dependent on none and related to none, then alone and miserable because man will not associate with him. Revenge: if he cannot inspire love he will cause fear, and he tells Victor "I shall be with you on your wedding-night." Responsibility: Victor calls the creature his own spirit let loose, Justine says she confessed a lie, and the creature tells Walton he has murdered the lovely and the helpless. A paragraph that uses only the creature's complaint, or only Victor's disgust, is half the argument.
How many quotes should I learn for GCSE or A level English?
The exam board specifications do not set a number. Learn fewer lines than you are tempted to, and know them well enough to place them in the right letter or chapter. A quotation you cannot find in the story will not help you. The lines on this page are a bank to choose from, not a list to memorise in full.
Which edition of Frankenstein is this, 1818 or 1831?
This page follows Project Gutenberg eBook 84, which is the 1831 text: four letters and twenty-four chapters, with no volume breaks. Elizabeth enters as the daughter of a Milanese nobleman, where the 1818 text makes her Victor's cousin by birth. The 1818 edition was printed in three volumes, with chapters numbered again in each, and some passages differ. For GCSE, AQA lists Frankenstein (1831). Edexcel prescribes no edition, and OCR does not set the novel. If your copy is 1818, do not learn these chapter numbers. The exams are closed book, so check the wording against the copy you revise from.
Which famous Frankenstein lines are easy to misremember?
The creature says "I shall be with you on your wedding-night." Later in the same chapter Victor remembers it as "I will be with you on your wedding-night." They are not the same sentence. This text has "Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful," with a comma after Beware and no comma before and. "I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine" is not in this book. The film speech is not a substitute for the glacier or the ship.