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When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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If we would know what heaven is before we come thither, let us retire into the depths of our own spirits, and we shall find it there among holy thoughts and feelings.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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It is very singular how the fact of a man's death often seems to give people a truer idea of his character, whether for good or evil, than they have ever possessed while he was living and acting among them.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Sleeping or waking, we hear not the airy footsteps of the strange things that almost happen.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-pern, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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A perfect pond-lily is the most satisfactory of flowers.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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At no time are people so sedulously careful to keep their trifling appointments, attend to their ordinary occupations, and thus put a commonplace aspect on life, as when conscious of some secret that if suspected would make them look monstrous in the general eye.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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At almost every step in life we meet with young men from whom we anticipate wonderful things, but of whom, after careful inquiry, we never hear another word. Life certain chintzes, calicoes, and ginghams, they show finely on their first newness, but cannot stand the sun and rain, and assume a very sober aspect after washing day.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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What we need for our happiness is often close at hand, if we knew but how to seek for it.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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It is not good for man to cherish a solitary ambition. Unless there be those around him, by whose example he may regulate himself, his thoughts, desires, and hopes will become extravagant, and he the semblance, perhaps the reality, of a madman
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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There is evil in every human heart, which may remain latent, perhaps, through the whole of life; but circumstances may rouse it to activity.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Life figures itself to me as a festal or funereal procession.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The love of science to rival the love of woman, in its depth and absorbing energy.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Some maladies are rich and precious and only to be acquired by the right of inheritance or purchased with gold.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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It is a little remarkable, that - though disinclined to talk overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends - an autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me, in addressing the public.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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We are as happy as people can be, without making themselves ridiculous, and might be even happier; but, as a matter of taste, we choose to stop short at this point.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Just as there comes a warm sunbeam into every cottage window, so comes a lovebeam of God's care and pity for every separate need.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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My wife is - in the strictest sense - my sole companion, and I need no other. There is no vacancy in my mind any more than in my heart.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Cupid in these latter times has probably laid aside his bow and arrow, and uses fire-arms -- a pistol -- perhaps a revolver.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Or-but this more rarely happened-she would be convulsed with a rage of grief, and sob out her love for her mother, in broken words, and seem intent on proving that she had a heart, by breaking it.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Why are poets so apt to choose their mates, not for any similarity of poetic endowment, but for qualities which might make the happiness of the rudest handicraftsman as well as that of the ideal craftsman of the spirit? Because, probably, at his highest elevation, the poet needs no human intercourse; but he finds it dreary to descend, and be a stranger.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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If we take the freedom to put a friend under our microscope, we thereby insulate him from many of his true relations, magnify his peculiarities, inevitably tear him into parts, and, of course, patch him very clumsily together again. What wonder, then, should we be frightened by the aspect of a monster.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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And what is more melancholy than the old apple-trees that linger about the spot where once stood a homestead, but where there is now only a ruined chimney rising our of a grassy and weed-grown cellar? They offer their fruit to every wayfarer--apples that are bitter-sweet with the moral of times vicissitude.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Insincerity in a man's own heart must make all his enjoyments, all that concerns him, unreal; so that his whole life must seem like a merely dramatic representation.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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As the architecture of a country always follows the earliest structures, American architecture should be a refinement of the log-house. The Egyptian is so of the cavern and the mound; the Chinese, of the tent; the Gothic, of overarching trees; the Greek, of a cabin.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Quote of the day
Destiny is the invention of the cowardly, and the resigned.
Ignazio Silone
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Creative Commons
Born:
July 4, 1804
Died:
May 19, 1864
(aged 59)
Bio:
Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist, Dark Romantic, and short story writer.
Known for:
The Scarlet Letter (1850)
The House of the Seven Gables (1851)
The Blithedale Romance (1852)
Twice-Told Tales (1837)
The Marble Faun (1860)
Most used words:
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man
life
dream
love
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day
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nature
moment
time
sin
hand
society
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