Nathaniel Hawthorne

She named the minister; and the moment she did so, all the reserve melted away, and burst into tears. Not, however, that the sight of him was any new sensation. He had long been in her eyes, a necessity; and she had habitually overflowed with awe, to him in the pulpit, and to do him reverence the dread being had vanished.

Trusting no man as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy when the latter actually appeared.

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

Among many morals which press upon us from the poor minister's miserable experience, we put only this into a sentence: — "Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!"

"Never, never!" whispered she. "What we did had a consecration of its own."

In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvelous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it.

God will give him blood to drink!

The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers — stern and wild ones, — and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.

My heart was a habitation large enough for many guests, but lonely and chill, and without a household fire. I longed to kindle one! It seemed not so wild a dream.

Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart.

There is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghostlike, the spot where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime; and still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it.

Let the black flower blossom as it may!