“I may affirm that my life has been on the whole, the life of a philosopher; from my birth I was made an intellectual creature: and intellectual in the highest sense of my pursuits and pleasures have been, even from my school-boy days. If opium eating be a sensual pleasure, and if I am bound to confess that I have indulged in it to an excess, not yet recorded of any other man, it is no less true with a religious zeal, and have, at length, accomplished what I have never yet attributed to any other man-have untwisted, almost to its final links, the accursed chain which fettered me.”
Thomas De Quincey, “Confessions of an English Opium Eater”, 1822.
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