novelist and short story writer, best known today for his 1897 Gothic
novel Dracula
. During his lifetime, he was better known as personal assistant of actor Henry Irving
and business manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London, which Irving owned.
Stoker was born on 8 November 1847 at 15 Marino Crescent, Clontarf, on the northside of Dublin, Ireland. His parents were Abraham Stoker (1799–1876), from Dublin, and Charlotte Mathilda Blake Thornley (1818–1901), who came from Ballyshannon
, County Donegal
.
I am Dracula, and I bid you welcome, Mr. Harker, to my house. Come in, the night air is chill, and you must need to eat and rest.
We are in Transylvania, and Transylvania is not England. Our ways are not your ways, and there shall be to you many strange things.
Listen to them - children of the night. What music they make.
No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be.
Despair has its own calms.
Nothing is too small. I counsel you, put down in record even your doubts and surmises. Hereafter it may be of interest to you to see how true you guess. We learn from failure, not from success!
Oh, friend John, it is a strange world, a sad world, a world full of miseries, and woes, and troubles. And yet when King Laugh come, he make them all dance to the tune he play.
I have always thought that a wild animal never looks so well as when some obstacle of pronounced durability is between us. A personal experience has intensified rather than diminished that idea.