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Oh, for the years I have not lived, but only dreamed of living.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

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Nathaniel Hawthorne
Age: 59 †
Born: 1804
Born: July 4
Died: 1864
Died: May 18
Diplomat
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Salem
Massachusetts
Nathaniel Hathorne
Monsieur de l'Aubépine
N. H.
Years
Dreamed
Lived
Living

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Such has often been my apathy, when objects long sought, and earnestly desired, were placed within my reach.
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We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.
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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.
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Shall we never never get rid of this Past? ... It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body.
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Masculine observers, if the birth-mark did not heighten their admiration, contented themselves with wishing it away, that the world might possess one living specimen of ideal loveliness, without the semblance of a flaw.
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Keep the imagination sane--that is one of the truest conditions of communion with heaven.
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I do detest all offices - all, at least, that are held on a political tenure.
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A high truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and skilfully wrought out, brightening at every step, and crowning the final development of a work of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is never any truer, and seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first.
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The world, that grey-bearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without being venerable.
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The heart of true womanhood knows where its own sphere is, and never seeks to stray beyond it!
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Nobody will use other people's experience, nor have any of his own till it is too late to use it.
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His stories are good to hear at night, because we can dream about them asleep and good in the morning, too, because then we can dream about them awake. (Cowslip)
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A human spirit may find no insufficiency of food fit for it, even in the Custom House.
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What would a man do, if he were compelled to live always in the sultry heat of society, and could never bathe himself in cool solitude?
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Nothing is more unaccountable than the spell that often lurks in a spoken word. A thought may be present to the mind, and two minds conscious of the same thought, but as long as it remains unspoken their familiar talk flows quietly over the hidden idea.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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This world owes all its forward impulses to people ill at ease.
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To be left alone in the wide world with scarcely a friend,--this makes the sadness which, striking its pang into the minds of the young and the affectionate, teaches them too soon to watch and interpret the spirit-signs of their own hearts.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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.
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Bees are sometimes drowned in the honey which they collectso some writers are lost in their collected learning.
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What, in the name of common-sense, had I to do with any better society than I had always lived in?
Nathaniel Hawthorne