“A woman being never at a loss... the devil always sticks by them.”
― George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron: Selected Letters and Journals

“For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.”
― George Gordon Byron

“But what is Hope? Nothing but the paint on the face of Existence; the least touch of truth rubs it off, and then we see what a hollow-cheeked harlot we have got hold of.”
― George Gordon Byron

“The poor dog, in life the firmest friend, The first to welcome, foremost to defend, Whose honest heart is still the master's own, Who labours, fights, lives, breathes for him alone, Unhonour'd falls, unnoticed all his worth, Denied in heaven the soul he held on earth, While man, vain insect hopes to be forgiven, And claims himself a sole exclusive heaven.”
― Lord Byron

“I am, as far as I can tell, about a month behind Lord Byron. In every town we stop at we discover innkeepers, postillions, officials, burghers, potboys, and all kinds and sorts of ladies whose brains still seem somewhat deranged from their brief exposure to his lordship. And though my companions are careful to tell people that I am that dreadful being, an English magician, I am clearly nothing in comparison to an English poet and everywhere I go I enjoy the reputation- quite new to me, I assure you- of the quiet, good Englishman, who makes no noise and is no trouble to any one...”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“A lovely young Italian girl passed by. Byron tilted his head to a very odd angle, half-closed his eyes and composed his features to suggest that he was about to expire from chronic indigestion. Dr Greysteel could only suppose that he was treating the young woman to the Byronic profile and the Byronic expression.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“Remember thee! remember thee!
Till Lethe quench life's burning stream
Remorse and shame shall cling to thee,
And haunt thee like a feverish dream!

Remember thee! Aye, doubt it not.
Thy husband too shall think of thee:
By neither shalt thou be forgot,
Thou false to him, thou fiend to me!”
― Lord George Gordon Byron

“Too high for common selfishness , he could
At times resign his own for others' good,
But not in pity - not because he ought,
But in some strange perversity of thought,
That swayed him onward with a secred pride
To do what few or none could do beside;
And this same impulse would, in tempting time,
Mislead his spirit equally to crime;
So much he soared beyond, or sank beneath,
The men with whom he felt condemned to breathe
And longed by good or ill to seperate
Himself from all who shared his mortal fate.”
― Lord Byron

“The mind which is immortal makes itself
Requital for its good or evil thoughts,
Is its own origin of ill and end,
And its own place and time; its innate sense,
When stripped of this mortality, derives
No colour from the fleeting things without,
But is absorb'd in sufferance or in joy,
Born from the knowledge of its own desert.”
― Lord Byron, Manfred

“…the rising movement of romanticism, with its characteristic idealism, one that tended toward a black-and-white view of the world based on those ideas, preferred for different reasons that women remain untinged by “masculine” traits of learning. Famous romantic writers such as Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Hazlitt criticized the bluestockings. …and Hazlitt declared his 'utter aversion to Bluestockingism … I do not care a fig for any woman that knows even what an author means.' Because of the tremendous influence that romanticism gained over the cultural mind-set, the term bluestocking came to be a derogatory term applied to learned, pedantic women, particularly conservative ones. ... Furthermore, learned women did not fit in with the romantic notion of a damsel in distress waiting to be rescued by a knight in shining armor any more than they fit in with the antirevolutionary fear of progress.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More—Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist

“England is seen at its worst when it has to deal with men like Wilde. In Germany Wilde and Byron are appreciated as authors: in England they still go pecking about their love-affairs. Anyone who calls a book ‘immoral’ or 'moral’ should be caned. A book by itself can be neither. It is only a question of the morality or immorality of the reader. But the English approach all questions of vice with such a curious mixture of curiosity and fear that it’s impossible to deal with them.”
― Charles Hamilton Sorley, The Letters of Charles Sorley, with a Chapter of Biography

“With fame, money and sex settled, he had to find something else to fight, and like any honorable man he chose to fight his own people. And that was how Byron the sentimental poet of graveyards and lost loves became the Satanic joker all England loved to hate.”
― John Dolan

“Tomorrow would have given him all,
Repaid his pangs, repair’d his fall:
Tomorrow would have been the first
Of days no more deplored or crust,
But bright, and long, and beckoning years, Seen dazzling through the mist of tears,
Guerdon of many a painful hour;
Tomorrow would have given him power
To rule, to shine, to smite, to save—
And must it dawn upon his grave?”
― Lord Byron, The poetical works of Lord Byron

“Time! On whose arbitrary wing
The varying hours must flag or fly,
Whose tardy winter, fleeting spring,
But drag or drive us on to die”
― Lord Byron, The poetical works of Lord Byron

“Pero si Shakespeare fue ese inglés capaz de sentir como un meridonial, Byron fue capaz de vivir como un italiano, de reaccionar como un albanés, de morir como un griego.”
― William Ospina, El año del verano que nunca llegó

“Yes, my mother was on about Byron. But who wants to be like Byron? I despise him.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“And while I was going to meet
the flowers and sculptures of Montreux,
I smelled Lord Byron’s ink
sweating an amazing darkness out
from the medieval body of Chillon Castle

From the poem - Along the Shore”
― Munia Khan, Fireclay

“Byron is an atheist and does not believe in life after death. We are haunted by ourselves, he says, and that is enough for any man.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“I believe it is each man's task to awaken his own soul. His soul is that part of him not subject to death and decay; that part of him made alive to truth and beauty. If he has no soul he is a brute.

And where does this soul go, at death? said Byron.

That is unknown, answered Shelley; the becoming of the soul, not its going, should be our concern. The mystery of life is on earth, not elsewhere.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“I wish to know, said Claire.

God help us, muttered Byron.

I wish TO KNOW why all that ails mankind must be the fault of womankind?

Women are weak, said Byron.

Or perhaps men need to believe it is so, I said.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“With nothing left to love— there’s naught to dread.”
― Lord Byron, The Poetical Works of Lord Byron, Complete; Volume 2

“For time at last sets all things even
And if we do but watch the hour,
There never yet was human power.”
― Lord Byron, The poetical works of Lord Byron

“But he who seeks the flowers of truth
Must quit the garden for the field”
― Lord Byron, The poetical works of Lord Byron

“Byron’s diabolism, if indeed it deserves the name, was of a mixed type. He shared, to some extent, Shelley’s Promethean attitude, and the Romantic passion for Liberty; and this passion, which inspired his more political outbursts, combined with the image of himself as a man of action to bring about the Greek adventure. And his Promethean attitude merges into a Satanic (Miltonic) attitude. The romantic conception of Milton’s Satan is semi-Promethean, and also contemplates Pride as a virtue. It would be difficult to say whether Byron was a proud man, or a man who liked to pose as a proud man – the possibility of the two attitudes being combined in the same person does not make them any less dissimilar in the abstract. Byron was certainly a vain man, in quite simple ways:

I can’t complain, whose ancestors are there,
Erneis, Radulphus – eight-and-forty manors
(If that my memory doth not greatly err)
Were their reward for following Billy’s banners.

His sense of damnation was also mitigated by a touch of unreality: to a man so occupied with himself and with the figure he was cutting nothing outside could be altogether real. It is therefore impossible to make out of his diabolism anything coherent or rational. He was able to have it both ways, it seems; and to think of himself both as an individual isolated and superior to other men because of his own crimes, and as a naturally good and generous nature distorted by the crimes committed against it by others. It is this inconsistent creature that turns up as the Giaour, the Corsair, Lara, Manfred and Cain; only as Don Juan does he get nearer to the truth about himself. But in this strange composition of attitudes and beliefs the element that seems to me most real and deep is that of a perversion of the Calvinist faith of his mother’s ancestors.”
― T.S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets

“With fame, money and sex settled, he had to find something else to fight, and like any honorable man he chose to fight his own people. And that was how Byron the sentimental poet of graveyards and lost loves became the Satanic joker all England loved to hate.”
― John C Dolan

“Por fortuna, Byron nunca entendió ese defecto de su pie derecho como lo que realmente era: la marca de la divinidad que lo hizo poeta. Si no hubiera sido por ella, dado su carácter arrogante y licencioso, tal vez no habría sido más que un aristócrata decadente, abusivo con sus amigos y chupador de la sangre de sus amores; pero la conciencia física de su imperfección, ese pie que dejaba siempre una raya larga en la arena, lo obligaba a pensar y a sufrir, y su genio encontró en ese encogerse sobre sí mismo la ocasión de destilar unas gotas de sabiduría divina.”
― William Ospina, El año del verano que nunca llegó

“Ze pakte het volgende boek, schudde ermee om te zien of er een briefje in zat en sloeg het open. Trelawny’s herinneringen aan Byron en Shelley.
Ze sloeg het open en begon te lezen (want het was geen heilig exemplaar, geen zeldzaamheid, maar gedateerd Londen, 1932). Trelawny? De man die het lichaam van Shelley had verbrand en het hart had bewaard. Ja, die Trelawny. De piraat. Een reus. Ging na de dood van Shelley met Byron naar Griekenland.”
― Marian Engel, Bear

“From the late eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century an influx of dilletantes, academics, artists, writers, travellers and eccentrics descended unto the barren plains of Greece to pick over the marble bones of the past in the hope of finding some meaningful connection with Homer and Thucydides. The Levantine Lunatics, as Lord Byron termed them, many of them British, but also Germans, French and other Westerners, went on to paint, record and loot the past. Marbles, such as those made famous by Lord Elgin, pilfered or otherwise from classical sites, made their way into the country houses and museums of Europe. Byron, although critical of his contemporaries, was in many ways one of them, the difference being that he made a point of appreciating the here and now, the reality of the Oriental present as opposed to the classical past, and embracing the people who lived there even if they were regarded as debased specimens by his fellow travellers.”
― Eugenia Russell, Ali Pasha, Lion of Janina: The Remarkable Life of the Balkan Napoleon

“Adoration is what I wanted
But I received love, instead

We clamor for Byron and Keats
yet Austen taught us Knightley and Darcy
Words mean nothing if not followed by
Action
And this is why she gave us Brandon...”
― Cheryl Seely Savage, Carve a Place for Me

“The influence of the incomprehensible phantasma which hovered over Lord Byron has been more or less felt by all who ever approached him. That he sometimes came out of the cloud, and was familiar and earthly, is true; but his dwelling was amid the murk and mist, and the home of his spirit in the abysm of the storm, and the hiding-places of guilt.”
― John Galt, The life of Lord Byron / by John Galt. 1900 [Leather Bound]