“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.”
Quote by Nathaniel Hawthorne
“As far as my experience goes, men of genius are fairly gifted with the social qualities; and in this age, there appears to be a fellow-feeling among them, which had not heretofore been developed. As men, they ask nothing better than to be on equal terms with their fellow-men; and as authors, they have thrown aside their proverbial jealousy, and acknowledge a generous brotherhood.”
Source: Mosses from an Old Manse
“If mankind were all intellect, they would be continually changing, so that one age would be entirely unlike another. The great conservative is the heart, which remains the same in all ages; so that commonplaces of a thousand years' standing are as effective as ever.”
Source: Passages from the English Note-books of Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Halfway down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old Pyncheon House; and an elm-tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon Elm.”
Source: The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Novels, Short Stories, Poems, Essays, Letters and Memoirs (Illustrated): The Scarlet Letter with its Adaptation, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, Tanglewood Tales, Birthmark, Ghost of Doctor Harris… (Including Biographies and Literary Criticism)
“Bees are sometimes drowned in the honey which they collectso some writers are lost in their collected learning.”
“The present is burthened too much with the past.”
“America is now wholly given over to a d--d mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash - and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed. What is the mystery of these innumerable editions of the Lamplighter, and other books neither better nor worse? - worse they could not be, and better they need not be, when they sell by 100,000.”
Source: The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings
“It [Catholicism] supplies a multitude of external forms in which the spiritual may be clothed and manifested.”
Source: Complete Novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated Edition): Fanshawe, The Scarlet Letter with its Adaptation, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, The Marble Faun, The Dolliver Romance, Septimius Felton, Grimshawe's Secret and Biography
“By no means run in debt: take thine own measure, Who cannot live on twenty pound a year, Cannot on forty.”
Source: The Church Porch, :... [being the Introduction to the Poem Entitled
“Rise, heart; thy Lord is risen. Sing His praise Without delays, Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise With Him mayst rise: That, as His death calcined thee to dust, His life may make thee gold, and, much more, just.”
Source: The Works of the Rev. George Hebert
“He that endures is not overcome.”
Source: The poetical works of George Herbert