38 Quotes by Paul Collins

I know the ways of the Mafia.

When Jules Verne was on everyone’s nightstand, Pulitzer ordered daredevil reporter Nellie Bly to travel around the world in eighty days; she accomplished it in seventy-two.

Even the few streets with unobstructed brick sidewalks were comically narrow – just wide enough, as one chronicler put it, to accommodate “two lean men to walk abreast or one fat man alone.

The assembly proceeded to the new grave that would come to serve as a burial place for Edgar, Virginia, and Aunt Maria, reuniting the peculiar household that been Poe’s sorrow and solace in life. There they read aloud his final poem, “Annabel Lee” – and in its last lines, the farewell of an artist finally at rest: And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling – my darling – my life and my bride In her sepulchre there by the sea – In her tomb by the sounding sea.

If every man who wrote a story which was indirectly inspired by Poe were to pay a tithe towards a monument,” Doyle later mused, “it would be such as would dwarf the pyramids.

On the morning of his funeral, the Baltimore Sun failed to announce the service, but mourned that his death “will cause poignant regret among all who admire genius, and have sympathy for the frailties too often attending it.

And yet something unsettling remained about the notion of John Pastano as a willful murderer: the recollection, perhaps, that after murdering Mary Castro, he had filled his hat with her blood and wandered out into the street with it. When he was collared over by the Tea-Water Pump, broken English had spilled out from the man. “Why you catch me?” he asked innocently. “Me not do.

At five that morning, Edgar Allan Poe met the fate anticipated in his poem “To Annie”: Thank Heaven! the crisis – The danger is past, And the lingering illness, Is over at last – And the Fever called ‘Living’ Is conquer’d at last.

Such madness was strictly prohibited in New York, but not in New Jersey.