Frankenstein

unsullied descent united with riches. A man might be respected with only
one of these advantages; but, without either, he was considered, except
in very rare instances, as a vagabond and a slave, doomed to waste his
powers for the profits of the chosen few! And what was I? Of my creation
and creator I was absolutely ignorant; but I knew that I possessed no
money, no friends, no kind of property. I was, besides, endued with a
figure hideously deformed and loathsome; I was not even of the same
nature as man. I was more agile than they, and could subsist upon
coarser diet; I bore the extremes of heat and cold with less injury to
my frame; my stature far exceeded theirs. When I looked around, I saw
and heard of none like me. Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth,
from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned?

"I cannot describe to you the agony that these reflections inflicted
upon me: I tried to dispel them, but sorrow only increased with
knowledge. Oh, that I had for ever remained in my native wood, nor known
nor felt beyond the sensations of hunger, thirst, and heat!

"Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind, when it
has once seized on it, like a lichen on the rock. I wished sometimes to