Nathaniel Hawthorne

In part, therefore, the attachment which I speak of is the mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust.

Positively I had lived three weeks beside it before it grew quite clear to my perception which way the current flowed.

The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a human countenance, bearing the traces not merely of outward storm and sunshine, but expressive also, of the long lapse of mortal life, and accompanying vicissitudes that have passed within.

Paradise, indeed! Nobody else in the world, I am bold to affirm⁠—nobody, at least, in our bleak little world of New England⁠—had dreamed of Paradise that day except as the pole suggests the tropic.

Neither the front nor the back entrance of the Customhouse opens on the road to Paradise.

A work of genius is but the newspaper of a century, or perchance of a hundred centuries.

However the flowers might have come there, it was both sad and sweet to observe how Nature adopted to herself this desolate, decaying, gusty, rusty old house of the Pyncheon family; and how the ever-returning Summer did her best to gladden it with tender beauty, and grew melancholy in the effort.

Pigs! Good heavens! had we come out from among the swinish multitude for this?

They seemed to have flung away all the golden grain of practical wisdom, which they had enjoyed so many opportunities of harvesting, and most carefully to have stored their memories with the husks.

“If she were my wife, I’d never part with that birthmark.”

People in difficulty and distress, or in any manner at odds with the world, can endure a vast amount of harsh treatment, and perhaps be only the stronger for it; whereas they give way at once before the simplest expression of what they perceive to be genuine sympathy.

“He knocks as if he had a right to come in,” said Zenobia, laughing.

Then, at such an hour, and with this scene before him, if a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.

“That old woman taught me my catechism,” said the young man; and there was a world of meaning in this simple comment.

Must the whole world toil, that the palms of her hands may be kept white and delicate?

It is so rare, in these times, to meet with a man of prayerful habits (except, of course, in the pulpit), that such an one is decidedly marked out by the light of transfiguration, shed upon him in the divine interview from which he passes into his daily life.

The moment when a man’s head drops off is seldom or never, I am inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of his life.

Blessed are all simple emotions, be they dark or bright!

Individuals whose affairs have reached an utterly desperate crisis almost invariably keep themselves alive with hopes, so much the more airily magnificent as they have the less of solid matter within their grasp whereof to mould any judicious and moderate expectation of good.

A bachelor always feels himself defrauded, when he knows or suspects that any woman of his acquaintance has given herself away.