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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.
Book
Atmosphere
Looks
Requires
Exceedingly
Would
Pages
Twilight
Like
Written
Volume
Clear
Blank
Read
Opened
Anything
Sunshine
Look
Brown

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Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens and wallflowers need ruin to make them grow.
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The greatest possible mint of style is to make the words absolutely disappear into the thought.
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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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Earth has one angel less and heaven one more, since yesterday.
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Christian faith is a grand cathedral, with divinely pictured windows. Standing without, you see no glory, nor can possibly imagine any standing within, every ray of light reveals a harmony of unspeakable splendors.
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Every crime destroys more Edens than our own
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Would Time but await the close of our favorite follies, we should all be young men, all of us, and until Doom's Day.
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Keep the imagination sane--that is one of the truest conditions of communion with heaven.
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The divine chemistry works in the subsoil.
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Truth often finds its way to the mind close muffled in robes of sleep, and then speaks with uncompromising directness of matters in regard to which we practise an unconscious self-deception during our waking moments.
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Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.
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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 is the voice of song when the world lacks the ear of taste?
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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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Unquestionably we do stand by our national flag as stoutly as any people in the world and I myself have felt the heart-throb at sight of it, as sensibly as other men.
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The world, that grey-bearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without being venerable.
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What a sweet reverence is that when a young man deems his mistress a little more than mortal and almost chides himself for longing to bring her close to his heart.
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We sometimes congratulate ourselves.
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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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