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

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Great men need to be lifted upon the shoulders of the whole world, in order to conceive their great ideas or perform their great deeds. That is, there must be an atmosphere of greatness round about them. A hero cannot be a hero unless in an heroic world.
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The sorrow that lay cold in her mother's heart... converted it into a tomb.
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Masculine observers, if the birth-mark did not heighten their admiration, contented themselves with wishing it away, that the world might possess one living specimen of ideal loveliness, without the semblance of a flaw.
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A man--poet, prophet, or whatever be may be--readily persuades himself of his right to all the worship that is voluntarily tendered.
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This dull river has a deep religion of its own so, let us trust, has the dullest human soul, though, perhaps, unconsciously.
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Dream strange things and make them look like truth.
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If truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a bosom.
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it is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom.
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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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Let the black flower blossom as it may!
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Eager souls, mystics and revolutionaries, may propose to refashion the world in accordance with their dreams but evil remains, and so long as it lurks in the secret places of the heart, utopia is only the shadow of a dream
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Labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionately brutalized.
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Such has often been my apathy, when objects long sought, and earnestly desired, were placed within my reach.
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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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Come, therefore, and let us fling mud at them!
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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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Technologies of easy travel give us wings they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage they spiritualize travel! Transition being so facile, what can be any man's inducement to tarry in one spot?
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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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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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She could no longer borrow from the future to ease her present grief.
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