Life & Wisdom Quote by Bram Stoker

Accuracy becomes Van Helsing's first weapon, not against Dracula but against disbelief. Stoker gives his most flamboyant character a moment of almost legalistic self-control: “Let me be accurate in everything” reads like an oath sworn in advance of testimony. The line anticipates the reader’s skepticism as much as the other characters’—a sly meta-move in a novel built out of documents (journals, letters, phonograph notes) that pretend to be evidence. If the story is going to ask you to accept the impossible, it has to overcompensate with procedure.

The subtext is panic managed as professionalism. Van Helsing isn’t just fearing that he’ll be called mad; he’s policing his own mind under pressure. “The long strain on nerves” frames madness as cumulative, almost medical, which lets him admit fragility without losing authority. Stoker threads the Victorian obsession with sanity and diagnosis into the plot: the supernatural isn’t merely terrifying, it’s socially disqualifying. To be wrong about a vampire is embarrassing; to be right is worse, because it puts you outside the consensus reality that keeps reputations intact.

Contextually, this is late-19th-century Gothic trying to sound modern. The novel’s horror works by colliding old-world monstrosity with new-world documentation. Van Helsing’s insistence on precision is the book’s strategy: bind terror in paperwork, staple chaos to facts, and hope that rational narration can hold the line even as the unimaginable leaks through.