Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter (1850)

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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.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
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.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
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.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
At some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
If a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
She wanted — what some people want throughout life — a grief that should deeply touch her, and thus humanize and make her capable of sympathy.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
Trusting no man as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy when the latter actually appeared.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
In view of my previous weariness of office, and vague thoughts of resignation, 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.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
No, my little Pearl! Thou must gather thine own sunshine. I have none to give thee.

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

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

Nathaniel Hawthorne