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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.

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.
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Clear
Blank
Read
Opened
Anything
Sunshine
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Brown
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Twilight

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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.
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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.
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A man's bewilderment is the measure of his wisdom.
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London is like the grave in one respect -- any man can make himself at home there and whenever a man finds himself homeless elsewhere, he had better either die or go to London.
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Every individual has a place to fill in the world and is important in some respect whether he chooses to be so or not.
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In the depths of every heart there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and the revelry above may cause us to forget their existence.
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Our most intimate friend is not he to whom we show the worst, but the best of our nature.
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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.
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The ideas of people in general are not raised higher than the roofs of the houses. All their interests extend over the earth's surface in a layer of that thickness. The meeting-house steeple reaches out of their sphere.
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The greatest possible mint of style is to make the words absolutely disappear into the thought.
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It loves more readily than it hates.
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This greatest mortal consolation, which we derive from the transitoriness of all things-from the right of saying, in every conjuncture, This, too, will pass away.
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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.
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All merely graceful attributes are usually the most evanescent.
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The breath of peace was fanning her glorious brow, her head was bowed a very little forward, and a tress, escaping from its bonds, fell by the side of her pure white temple, and close to her just opened lips it hung there motionless! no breath disturbed its repose! She slept as an angel might sleep, having accomplished the mission of her God.
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He had been driven hither by the impulse of that Remorse which dogged him everywhere, and whose own sister and closely linked companion was that Cowardice which invariably drew him back, with her tremulous gripe, just when the other impulse had hurried him to the verge of a disclosure.
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No summer ever came back, and no two summers ever were alike. Times change, and people change and if our hearts do not change as readily, so much the worse for us.
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Do anything, save to lie down and die!
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In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it... She stood apart from mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer make itself seen or felt.
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A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world.
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