Nathaniel Hawthorne

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Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864) was a 19th-century American novelist and short story writer, best-known today for his many short stories and his romance novels The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun.

1 Sourced
- 1.1 The Scarlet Letter (1850)
- 1.2 The House of the Seven Gables (1851)
2 Attributed
3 External links

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Sourced

Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever.
- Wakefield (1835), in Twice Told Tales

His hour is one of darkness, and adversity, and peril. But should domestic tyranny oppress us, or the invader's step pollute our soil, still may the Gray Champion come, for he is the type of New England's hereditary spirit; and his shadowy march, on the eve of danger, must ever be the pledge, that New England's sons will vindicate their ancestry.
- The Gray Champion (1835), in Twice Told Tales

By the sympathy of your human hearts for sin ye shall scent out all the places — whether in church, bedchamber, street, field, or forest — where crime has been committed, and shall exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood spot.
- Young Goodman Brown (1835)

As the moral gloom of the world overpowers all systematic gaiety, even so was their home of wild mirth made desolate amid the sad forest.
- The Maypole of Merrymount (1836)

"What is the Unpardonable Sin?" asked the lime-burner; and then he shrank farther from his companion, trembling lest his question should be answered. "It is a sin that grew within my own breast," replied Ethan Brand, standing erect with a pride that distinguishes all enthusiasts of his stamp. "A sin that grew nowhere else! The sin of an intellect that triumphed over the sense of brotherhood with man and reverence for God, and sacrificed everything to its own mighty claims!
- Ethan Brand (1850), in The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales

The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages.
- Twice-Told Tales, preface (1851)

The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the truest heroism is, to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed.
- The Blithedale Romance (1852), chapter 2

It is because the spirit is inestimable that the lifeless body is so little valued.
- The Blithedale Romance, Chapter 28

In youth men are apt to write more wisely than they really know or feel; and the remainder of life may be not idly spent in realizing and convincing themselves of the wisdom which they uttered long ago.
- The Snow-Image, preface (1852)

No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land...Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens and wallflowers need ruin to make them grow.
- The Marble Faun, preface (1860)

Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed.
- The Marble Faun, Chapter 41

Mountains are earth's undecaying monuments.
- The Notch of the White Mountains, from Sketches from Memory (1868)

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The Scarlet Letter (1850)

If a man cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.
- Introduction, The Custom-House

On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A.
- Chapter 2

My heart was a habitation large enough for many guests, but lonely and chill, and without a household fire. I longed to kindle one! It seemed not so wild a dream.
- Chapter 4

There is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghostlike, the spot where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime; and still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it.
- Chapter 5

Wherever there is a heart and an intellect, the diseases of the physical frame are tinged with the peculiarities of these.
- Chapter 9

Trusting no man as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy when the latter actually appeared.
- Chapter 10

Let the black flower blossom as it may!
- Chapter 14

Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart.
- Chapter 15

"Never, never!" whispered she. "What we did had a consecration of its own."
- Chapter 17

The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers — stern, wild ones — and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.
- Chapter 18

No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.
- Chapter 20

Among many morals which press upon us from the poor minister's miserable experience, we put only this into a sentence:--"Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!"
- Chapter 24

It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual life upon another; each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his object.
- Chapter 24

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The House of the Seven Gables (1851)

Not to be deficient in this particular, the author has provided himself with a moral — the truth, namely, that the wrongdoing of one generation lives into the successive ones.
- Preface

God will give him blood to drink!
- Chapter 1

Life is made up of marble and mud.
- Chapter 2

What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!
- Chapter 11

Of all the events which constitute a person's biography, thre is scarcely one ... to which the world so easily reconciles itself as to his death.
- Chapter 21

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Attributed

A pure hand needs no glove to cover it.

A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats.

Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty.

All brave men love; for he only is brave who has affections to fight for, whether in the daily battle of life, or in physical contests.

Caresses, expressions of one sort or another, are necessary to the life of the affections as leaves are to the life of a tree. If they are wholly restrained, love will die at the roots.

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Every individual has a place to fill in the world and is important in some respect whether he chooses to be so or not.

Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it.

Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvelous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it.

It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate.

Love, whether newly born, or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, this it overflows upon the outward world.

Moonlight is sculpture.

My fortune somewhat resembled that of a person who should entertain an idea of committing suicide, and, altogether beyond his hopes, meet with the good hap to be murdered.

Nobody has any conscience about adding to the improbabilities of a marvelous tale.

Our Creator would never have made such lovely days, and have given us the deep hearts to enjoy them, above and beyond all thought, unless we were meant to be immortal.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

So she poured out the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of his spirit.

Sunlight is painting.

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.

The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash.

The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.

We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death.

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.