Photograph of Bram Stoker circa 1906

Biographile’s This Week in History remembers events of the past, and the icons that set them in motion. If you're stirred by the words below, read on for more inspiring author quotes.

Don’t put away all your spooky decorations just yet -- one final celebration calls for your vampire teeth and fake blood.

On November 8, 1847 -- fittingly close to Halloween -- Bram Stoker, the man who would one day be known as the father of Gothic horror, was born in Dublin, Ireland. Though he was a sickly child, bedridden until the age of seven with an unknown illness, he would grow into a healthy, even vigorous adult. Some say his mysterious sickness would later drive his growing obsession with the occult and the unexplained.

Stoker, best-known for writing Dracula, had diverse creative interests. Despite excelling in math and sciences in his school days, his first job would be as a lowly drama critic. Stoker’s writing was exceptional, and continued to be so in the face of literary circles that largely dismissed drama critics.

Stoker would go on to meet the famous actor Henry Irving in the late 1870s and it would be a life-changing encounter. The two became close friends, with Stoker managing Irving’s theater at the Lyceum -- a position he held for most of his life. Through Irving, he would write, travel extensively, and meet the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Walt Whitman, William McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt.

In honor of his birthday, here are nine of the best quotes from the books, letters, and writings of the creator one of the most iconic figures in literature.

1. "No man knows till he has suffered from the night, how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be." (Dracula, 1897)

2. "Despair has its own calms." (Dracula, 1897)

3. "From every life there may be a lesson but in the teeming millions of humanity such lessons can but seldom have any general or exhaustive force. The mere din of strife is too incessant for any individual sound to carry far." (Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, 1907)

4. "You reason well, and your wit is bold, but you are too prejudiced." (Dracula, 1897)

5. "Logically speaking, life, even of an actor, has no preface. He begins, and that is all." (Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, 1907)

6. "Writers can convey abstract ideas of controlling forces and purposes; of thwarting passions; of embarrassing weaknesses; of all the bundle of inconsistencies which make up an item of concrete humanity. From all these may be derived some consistent idea of individuality, at once the ideal and the objective of portraiture." (Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, 1907)

7. "We learn from failure, not from success." (Dracula, 1897)

8. "Fame…is won in minutes and seconds, not in years." (Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, 1907)

9. "It is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all, and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain." (Dracula, 1897)