Quote

Language,-human language,-after all is but little better than the croak and cackle of fowls, and other utterances of brute nature,-sometimes not so adequate.

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.
Language
Cackle
Nature
Croak
Littles
Utterances
Better
Fowl
Little
Brute
Human
Utterance
Humans
Brutes
Sometimes
Adequate
Fowls

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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.
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It was one of those moments—which sometimes occur only at the interval of years—when a man's moral aspect is faithfully revealed to his mind's eye. Not improbably, he had never before viewed himself as he did now.
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A bodily disease which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.
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Some maladies are rich and precious and only to be acquired by the right of inheritance or purchased with gold.
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You can get assent to almost any proposition so long as you are not going to do anything about it.
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Happiness is like a butterfly.
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We must not think too unkindly even of the east wind. It is not, perhaps, a wind to be loved, even in its benignest moods but there are seasons when I delight to feel its breath upon my cheek, though it be never advisable to throw open my bosom and take it into my heart, as I would its gentle sisters of the south and west.
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That pit of blackness that lies beneath us, everywhere ... the firmest substance of human happiness is but a thin crust spread over it, with just reality enough to bear up the illusive stage-scenery amid which we tread. It needs no earthquake to open the chasm.
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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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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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Families are always rising and falling in America.
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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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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A throng of bearded men in sad-colored garments and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and other bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.
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There is great incongruity in this idea of monuments, since those to whom they are usually dedicated need no such recognition to embalm their memory and any man who does, is not worthy of one.
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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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Ugliness without tact is horrible.
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Let the attempt be made, at whatever risk.
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This world owes all its forward impulses to people ill at ease.
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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.
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The greatest possible mint of style is to make the words absolutely disappear into the thought.
Nathaniel Hawthorne