Quote

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.

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.
Land
Romance
Happily
Wrong
Prosperity
Commonplace
Simple
Difficulty
Trial
Anything
Dear
Broads
Picturesque
Without
Shadow
Broad
Antiquity
Country
Case
Author
Gloomy
Writing
Mystery
Native
Daylight
Cases
Trials
Conceive

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I do detest all offices - all, at least, that are held on a political tenure.
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The thing you set your mind on is the thing you ultimately become.
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Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.
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I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house. So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air.
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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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Earth has one angel less and heaven one more, since yesterday.
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I wonder that we Americans love our country at all, it having no limits and no oneness and when you try to make it a matter of the heart, everything falls away except one's native State -neither can you seize hold of that, unless you tear it out of the Union, bleeding and quivering.
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The sorrow that lay cold in her mother's heart... converted it into a tomb.
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Though we speak nonsense, God will pick out the meaning of it.
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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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When individuals approach one another with deep purposes on both sides they seldom come at once to the matter which they have most at heart. They dread the electric shock of a too sudden contact with it.
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There is so much wretchedness in the world, that we may safely take the word of any mortal professing to need our assistance and, even should we be deceived, still the good to ourselves resulting from a kind act is worth more than the trifle by which we purchase it.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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She could no longer borrow from the future to ease her present grief.
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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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In youth men are apt to write more wisely than they really know or feel and the remainder of life may be not idly spent in realizing and convincing themselves of the wisdom which they uttered long ago.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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It is not good for man to cherish a solitary ambition. Unless there be those around him, by whose example he may regulate himself, his thoughts, desires, and hopes will become extravagant, and he the semblance, perhaps the reality, of a madman
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How is it possible to sayan unkind or irreverential word of Rome? The city of all time, and of all the world!
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What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!
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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