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If a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.

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.
Make
Dream
Things
Truth
Romances
Never
Look
Romance
Men
Looks
Sitting
Like
Need
Strange
Needs
Alone
Writing
Write
Trying
Cannot

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Easy reading is damn hard writing.
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Methinks it is a token of healthy and gentle characteristics, when women of high thoughts and accomplishments love to sew especially as they are never more at home with their own hearts than while so occupied.
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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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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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The heart of true womanhood knows where its own sphere is, and never seeks to stray beyond it!
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A pure hand needs no glove to cover it.
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Of all the events which constitute a person's biography, there is scarcely one ... to which the world so easily reconciles itself as to his death.
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Thus we see, too, in the world that some persons assimilate only what is ugly and evil from the same moral circumstances which supply good and beautiful results--the fragrance of celestial flowers--to the daily life of others.
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Let the black flower blossom as it may!
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There is no season when such pleasant and sunny spots may be lighted on, and produce so pleasant an effect on the feelings as now in October.
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All merely graceful attributes are usually the most evanescent.
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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 thing you set your mind on is the thing you ultimately become.
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The love of posterity is the consequence of the necessity of death. If a man were sure of living forever here, he would not care about his offspring.
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There can be...no power...to disclose...the secrets that may be buried with a human heart. The heart, making itself guilty of such secrets, must perforce hold them until the day when all hidden things be revealed.
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I have come to see the nonsense of attempting to describe fine scenery. There is no such possibility. If scenery could be adequately reproduced in words, there would have been no need of God's making it in reality.
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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.
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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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It [Catholicism] supplies a multitude of external forms in which the spiritual may be clothed and manifested.
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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.
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