I never thought a memoir about doing drugs could be this dull. There are some interesting aspects, like de Quincy describing what being high is like, but without the language of describing 'highs' that we have today. It makes it harder to penetrate but more interesting in some ways. Also, de Quincy

I imagine this was once the ultimate literary car crash. And people rubbernecked even in the 19th century, which as far as I know did not have radial tires. But there have been so many truly gnarly drug slave narratives since the publication of this once "shocking" book (go Burroughs go!) that this

Opium-Eater is great but it's the rest of the writing here that really captured me. Suspiria de Profundis is a sublime work: its architecture as tortuously digressive and intricately labyrinthine as a Piranesi etching, its mosaics of dreamlight poetry haunting and beautiful like nothing else. De Qui

Like a lot of classics, I think I have more respect and admiration for "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater" (and other writings) than I do enjoyment of it. There is a certain level of kudos one has to give to de Quincey for being the first person to publically write about their drug addiction, an

For the right audience this will be an interesting read. For me there was not enough about what brought me to this book.

In giving Thomas De Quincey’s autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (Kindle Edition) 3 stars I find myself trying to justify at last a 4th. The style is too much o

I sometimes seem to have lived for 70 or 100 years in one night; nay, sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium passed in that time, or, however, of a duration far beyond the limits of any human experience. —Confessions

. . . I do not believe that any man, having once tasted the divine

Intolerably tough to read but a force worth going through. De Quincy was a xenophobe, drug addict, racist, imperialist, etc etc. But his writing is, hyperbole aside, incredible. He digresses, stops and starts tangents, and sometimes (actually often) ends stories with absolutely no resolution. Like p

De Quincey’s account on opium consumption is perhaps one of the earliest books on drugs addiction, before Charles Baudelaire’s Paradis artificiels. It seems that De Quincey started taking laudanum to relieve a stomach condition. The drug did not affect him negatively at first; on the contrary, it im