text:
Talk:Jack Thompson (attorney)

I'm not sure on his nationality even after giving a sight to Wikipedia - US? Aphaia
 * 2nd line of Jack Thompson (attorney): born in Ohio, practices in Florida (paraphrased). Will copy that text over. ~ Dread Lord C y b e r S k  u  l  l  ✎☠ 04:32, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

~ MosheZadka (Talk) 17:00, 27 August 2005 (UTC)

Are you sure this isn't a parody? (Kidding. What a moron...)

W....wow. That's... sad. He actually said all this stuff? Jeez. That's really sad.

Hey, im one of the people who keeps this upto date.

These have all been posted by him, on various internet sites and at various times.

In fact i just added a few from today. IanC 17:51, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

Revision
Livejournal has blanked Thompson's past posts (marked as "Suspended User") on Gamepolitics, so anything using this as a "source" really can no longer be used, despite actually ocurring. When I get some time, I'll go through and see which links are and are not valid, and remove quotes which can no longer be sourced (possibly via temporary commenting-out to preserve them for research).

Can we have some review of the current state of the page and attempt to find other sources for these, as well as perhaps inclusing other sources to back up the rest of the quotes? It'd go a long way toward improving this article. --Keyne 14:54, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

 * Perhaps we should comment out the quotes which are no longer cited until we can properly cite them (hopefully from a reputable source). --Bakkster Man 16:20, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

 * I just found the sources for most of the ones you commented out, one of thems an audio interview. The other one "Or Else" he has said a fair few times IanC 20:16, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Update, Or Else is clearly seen on the conversation he had with the VGCats suthor, so ill use that for the source.

Trimmed
I've taken out all the sections for letters that Mr. Thompson wrote to various people and organizations. Wikiquote is not a place for posting the full text of letters or other works. It also is not a place to record every single word he says, and as such, there should probably be a lot trimmed out of what remains. —LrdChaos 19:24, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

AS a side note, the longer quote in the "About" section at the bottom of the article should probably be sourced to the movie "Billy Madison", where the same statement was delivered about Adam Sandler's eponymous character.

1st Thessalonians 5:26
At the very end of the article, the verse used to defend homosexuality from the Bible is taken way out of context. At the time this was written, a kiss on the cheek was the same as shaking someone's hand now. Culture changes over time.

Clean up?
This article is rather long, and scouring it seems to suggest that there is some criticism of Jack Thompson among the quotes. I have neither the time nor the energy to fix the problem, so if anyone could, it would be appreciated. CKnapp [from Wikipedia]

First quote
The first quote, "Facts are overrated BS, Junior. Hooah!", has no source. Does anyone know where this came from, or whether Jack Thompson even said it?

it's not from him, it was vandalism. the thing is, it was vandalism on my part. the key to vandalizing a Wikiquote page is to make it sound like something they would say, not "I eat turds cause they good lol". 71.200.98.184 14:35, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

There are a few other "questionable" quotes attributed to Thompson laced throughout the page, unfortunately (including the first two). I'm reluctant to go and change the page without being absolutely certain that something was NOT a Thompson quote, since he knows how to use sarcasm quite well. --Nekojin 17:27, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

After a few minutes' thought: It looks like the entire article could stand to be trimmed. There are a lot of quotes that seem to be truncated, with a significant section completely missing. Also, there are a number of quotes that don't seem to make sense out of context, or are just plain pointless repetition of his favorite claims. --Nekojin 17:40, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

Who put the quote saying in horrible grammar that Jack thompson was gay because he did NOT play video games? It has been removed, but could somebody report who did this from the history, I don't have the time or energy-tnfan22

Some parts are quotable, but
For a person "often cited in the media" according to the lede, the article seems to consist in very large part of chatter from internet discussions. I seriously doubt the quotability of most of this material. ~ Ningauble 16:39, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

Unsourced

 * We are going to have a hearing here in Florida to stop release of the game to minors. But you all wouldn't know that at Joystiq, because all you apparently can read is cheat code books. Duh.
 *

Unsourced

 * Sims 2, the latest version of the Sims video game franchise...contains, according to video game news sites, full frontal nudity, including nipples, penis, labia, and hair.
 *

 * Honestly, are all of you gamers on drugs, or what!
 * Thompson to Scott Ramsoomair ,

 * 'EGM: You once compared Doug Lowenstein, president of the Entertainment Software Association, to Saddam Hussein. JT: If I did, I want to apologize to Saddam Hussein. Doug is a propagandist to whom the facts don't matter.'
 *

 * Are you, crazy? ... People are threatening to kill me. Either report what I have said, having been provided the emails, or stop bothering me.
 * Thompson to GameSpot.

 * You know, there are sociopaths everywhere. Some of them are in government, some of them are at TakeTwo. In fact, we got a bunch of sociopaths in Edinburgh, Scotland, sittin' around in kilts sippin' their single malt whiskey spreading racial, hurtful stereotypes in this country.
 * Audio Link

 * The Bible doesn't promote killing innocent people, Grand Theft Auto does. Islam does. Islam promotes the killing of innocent people. The Quran requires the infidel, whether Jew or Christian, to be killed. ... That's a core essence of the religion. ... Muhammad was a pirate who killed infidels and who advocated the killing of infidels. Not a nice guy. Osama bin Laden is in keeping with his fine tradition.
 * Sun-Sentinel, , ,

 * ...Or else
 *

 * Video gaming is an escapist activity and you’re being exploited by these companies. It’s not healthy; I worry about someone who would play Grand Theft Auto for ten hours a day. It’s a masturbatory activity, and it would be better if people put down the controller and went outside.

 * Why don't you go buy a suicide game, practice that, and get real good at it.
 * (said to prank caller)

 * We don't need to play the game; it's irrelevant to the subject.
 * posed question: "Considering that Bully hasn't yet come out, do you think it's fair to protest the game before its release?"
 * posed question: "Considering that Bully hasn't yet come out, do you think it's fair to protest the game before its release?"

 * These flowers were sent to harass me.
 *

 * Listen up, Joystiq Jackasses!
 *

 * Nobody shoots anybody in the face unless you're a hit man or a video gamer.
 *

 * "This idiot illspirit apparently can't read. The lawsuit will be on behalf of the "surviving" family members. That means the victims are dead. Duh. Yet he says the victims are still alive. Of course, what do you expect from a crazed gamer?"
 * Saturday, February 25, 2006 news story

 * The reason why CBS chose not to edit Stern is that Stern's Arbitron ratings remained high and were arguably even enhanced by people tuning in to hear daily about Stern's running feud with CBS and his move to Sirius, In other words, CBS actually used Stern's discussion of his move to Sirius to make more money for CBS.
 *

 * I am counsel for all of the plaintiffs, they are still my clients, I was the one who won the First Amendment argument in the hearing on November 3, 2005, which trial record was what was appealed to the Alabama Supreme Court, and I fully expect to be in the courtroom trying the case when it is tried.
 *

 * I'm a little too busy to care about pissant t-shirts right now. Please note the below:
 *

I am also working with the LA District Attorney. All of these efforts have resulted in a diminution in the value of Take-Two's stock and a real possibility that government and private action will drain the company of all its assets. Only a bunch of gamers would think that the only way to destroy a company is with an explosive device. Grow up and wake up. I'm on the verge, with God's help, of destroying the most out of control video game company on the planet, which even Warren Spector recognizes. Jack Thompson
 * Actually, "destroy" means destroy. My methods of choice have been numerous television exposes of the Grand Theft Auto games, in the US (60 Minutes, Today Show), in the UK (BBC, etc/), Canada, and elsewhere; preparing Hillary Clinton for her severe hit on Rockstar in July 2005 re Hot Coffee; and litigation. As to the latter, the Alabama Supreme Court said this past week that GTA is not First Amendment speech. I am working with the various law firms suing Take-Two on behalf of shareholders over the Hot Coffee matter.
 *

 * Oh, and what was the previous image? Do I have to get a subpoena issued to find out?
 *

 * Hey, how about a video game depicting the killing of the people who run Joystiq? Bet they'd be real interested in doing something about a certain game then.  Maybe then they'd feel how cops and women feel about GTA.  Oh, but that would require some actual thought, and I forgot:  You're all gamers!
 *

 * Kids took guns to school for 200 years in this country without turning them on one another. President Clinton understood that if we want to do something about gun violence, we need also to look at the stimuli to use those guns. 3000 gun laws on the books. Not a single law on the books to stop the sale of murder simulators to kids. Idiotic.
 *

 * It breaks my heart to realize that the culture has basically transformed the church rather than the church confronting the culture and trying to transform it," "You've got a generation of boys in this country who are spending sometimes dozens of hours a week blowing away people, Now they're going to have the opportunity to do it in a Christian setting and, you know, where does it stop?
 *

 * There’s direct link between violent video games and the kind of incident we almost had in Riverton, Kansas,""They took that affidavit and went to the homes of some of the suspects and found some of the games I suggested they would find,""These games are murder simulators used by the military to teach new recruits how to kill,
 *

I had represented abused women and children, and that album ("As Nasty as They Wanna Be") was totally inappropriate for minors...
 * Lets say you make a kid feel angry; he is going to act out what he has spent hundreds of hours doing. He has spent hundreds of hours hurting people in virtual reality. And the thing that is doubly troubling now is the graphics are so crisp and so virtually real that the brain can literally not differentiate between real violence and virtual violence, I'm a lawyer who for 20 years did medically related work. As a citizen, I entered the violent video game arena with the Paducah, Ky., shootings,
 *

 * Killing is such an incredibly dramatic thing to do. But I quickly became disabused of that skepticism. Now it's a whole body of thought that is very, very troubling. And we are seeing these instances with incredible frequency. Here we had one in Kansas and a day later in Alaska, Playing the games desensitizes the person to the act of killing, because there is no guilt. It's a game. You are winning the game, and it's a pleasurable thing. You can get a gamer's high killing people. And there's no need to feel guilty about it -- that's how you win the game. In the Civil War, for example, soldiers were found dead on the battle field with loaded muskets. It wasn't because the guns were malfunctioning. The soldiers were young men who had been trained by their parents to go hunting with guns -- not use them to kill others. And they couldn't do it, even in the face of hostile fire. So time and again these men would load their guns, raise them and pretend to fire. Those soldiers had not been trained to overcome their inhibition to kill, If somebody else's kid plays a video game and puts my kid in harm's way in school or someplace else, I have a legitimate interest in that, The Grand Theft Auto games immerse you in a lonely world of violence, cheap sex, and pixelated nihilism, Most experts say it takes more than 100 hours to complete all of GTA: San Andreas just once...
 *

 * It shows you how to -- by bullying -- take over your school. You punch people; you hit them with sling shots; you dunk their heads in dirty toilets. There's white-on-black crime in the game. You bludgeon teachers and classmates with bats. It's absolutely nuts. This is the most knuckle-headed thing I think any entertainment entity in the history of American entertainment has ever done. The word 'Columbine' means something. Everybody viscerally understands that you don't want to teach kids to bully one another. Suspects in the Kansas and Alaska incidents have bullying components just as Columbine's Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris did. Then you give them a simulator on how to exact their revenge and settle scores? It's crazy.
 *

"He's in his room. We don't hear anything and he not in the streets, But that's lazy parenting. Companies are making a product they know is problematic, but parents bear a responsibility.
 * His parents let him sit in his bedroom 12 or 13 hours a day on weekends, He had a bucket between his legs to urinate in. He had food and beverages on either side of the television screen. He did that because he couldn't pull himself away from the game.
 *

1. E3 will once again turn down my offer to appear on any stage and debate anyone about the harmfulness of violent games, and 2. There will be discussion of the following story that appears today in South Florida:
 * Two predictions:
 *

 * By the way, I was just watching G4 with my son. Who in the world watches this garbage? People with no lives, obviously. Pathetic.
 *

 * There's a lot of parental angst over the fact that these games are coming at out kids, and there must be some way to keep them away from our kids," "there's more evidence of that than there is that smoking causes cancer." "leave it up to a jury to find that the material is harmful to minors because of sex or violence. Don't have a statute defining what is harmful.
 *

“It is not a game,” Thompson told lawmakers. “It is to teach you to kill, to enjoy killing.”
 * “It’s a murder simulator,”
 *

 * We're going to push this game at Christian kids to let them know there's a cool shooter game out there," "Because of the Christian context, somehow it's OK? It's not OK. The context is irrelevant. It's a mass-killing game.
 *

 * The video game industry gave him a cranial menu that popped up in the blink of an eye in that police station," "And that menu offered him the split-second decision to kill the officers, shoot them in the head, flee in a police car, just as the game itself trained them to do.
 *

 * "It's a murder simulator, it's not a game." "The U.S. military literally uses modified versions of these games, as well as their own video games, to do one thing: to break down the inhibition to kill among new recruits,
 *

 * Jack Thompson on Free Talk Live debating his viewpoints. Thompson becomes so angry he hangs up on the hosts Ian and Mark.  There are plenty of good quotes here.
 * http://www.freetalklive.com/files/thompson.mp3

Looks like the profanity in GTA has filtered into the pixelante subculture. Anyway, we got the law passed unanimously in Louisiana and Video Game Nation got nothing passed, so is this a great country or what?! I'm working with the Louisiana AG's office, and we expect to have the law held constitutional as it is not like the other laws that have been passed. But you all here wouldn't know, because you haven't read the federal court rulings, I have, and then I drafted the law, which deals with the rulings. God bless Louisiana! Hooah! Jack Thompson
 * Wow, the level of comments here indicates why it is a good thing that gamers' standards are not the community's standards for discourse and entertainment.
 *

 * The corrupted and corrupting video game industry will, of course, challenge this law once it is signed by Governor Blanco. The reason is that this industry, through the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board), its developers' lobbyist, the ESA (Entertainment Software Association), and the retailers' lobbyist, IEMA (Interactive Entertainment Merchants Association) are involved in ongoing fraudulent conduct in marketing video games that contain adult material to children.
 *

Additionally, not real smart to hire a crew that has put out a t-shirt featuring a Jesus Christ who says "Don't be a dick." That shows how totally out of touch the coquettish Patricia Vance is with mainstream America. I love it. Boy, am I going to have fun with the "Dick" t-shirt. Jack Thompson
 * This would be a great idea if only the ESRB had the sense to hire an outfit whose principals had real talent.
 *

 * Radical, fascist Islamists recruit to their cause partly with the cry that American pop culture is raw sewage flowing to the rest of the world from a corrupted West. Take-Two helps cut the legs off the rebuttal to that argument. That is precisely why your corporate legs must be cut off
 *

If this court in any fashion proceeds toward issuing a show cause order, given its utter baselessness and the bad faith goo in which it slithers, then Thompson will add whatever judge should do so as a defendant in the aforementioned federal civil rights action…
 * You want to play hardball…? You want to try to throw me in jail?  You have no idea what you are unleashing in doing this.  You’re at the brink…
 *

 * Bully contains homosexual activities between Jimmy Hopkins and other male students. Is this a great country or what?
 *

 * I've got more Bar complaints than Judge Friedman has reversed opinions.
 *

… I am going to have an absolute ball pointing out to the world that Take-Two, the self-righteous, great defenders of “freedom of expression,” simply CANNOT abide Jack Thompson’s agent using allegedly protected trademarks of Take-Two. Freedom of expression my butt.
 * Are y’all threatening CBS and ABC and Rolling Stone and every gaming site and magazine in the universe, or just my college debate booking agent because you and your bullying company think they can get away with it?
 *

 * Take-Two is also stating that the sun does not rise in the east because Take-Two makes no money from its rising in the east.
 *

title: Talk:Jack Thompson (attorney)


text:
User:Stevey7788

Hi, I'm Stevey7788. I mainly edit on the English Wikipedia.

 * Please see my main user page here
 * User talk page on the English Wikipedia
 * Contributions on the English Wikipedia

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: User:Stevey7788


text:
User talk:201.141.67.88

Hi, thank you for your remark on citizenship & nationality Einsteins. By the way, --Aphaia 19:54, 12 August 2005 (UTC)

title: User talk:201.141.67.88


text:
User talk:Pedron~enwikiquote

--Aphaia 20:09, 12 August 2005 (UTC)

Your account will be renamed
Hello,

The developer team at Wikimedia is making some changes to how accounts work, as part of our on-going efforts to provide new and better tools for our users like cross-wiki notifications. These changes will mean you have the same account name everywhere. This will let us give you new features that will help you edit and discuss better, and allow more flexible user permissions for tools. One of the side-effects of this is that user accounts will now have to be unique across all 900 Wikimedia wikis. See the announcement for more information.

Unfortunately, your account clashes with another account also called Pedron. To make sure that both of you can use all Wikimedia projects in future, we have reserved the name Pedron~enwikiquote that only you will have. If you like it, you don't have to do anything. If you do not like it, you can pick out a different name.

Your account will still work as before, and you will be credited for all your edits made so far, but you will have to use the new account name when you log in.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Yours, Keegan Peterzell Community Liaison, Wikimedia Foundation 23:32, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Renamed
 This account has been renamed as part of single-user login finalisation. If you own this account you can |log in using your previous username and password for more information. If you do not like this account's new name, you can choose your own using this form after logging in: . -- Keegan (WMF) (talk) 05:54, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

title: User talk:Pedron~enwikiquote


text:
Talk:Porphyrios Bairaktaris

Some data:
 * the quoted book seems to be published from http://www.protectingveil.com
 * this monk would have belonged to the Greek Orthodox Church (one of denomination of Eastern Orthodox Church).
 * But his book is (very interestedly) mentioned in a different church (see google).
 * Google hits are 610 for "Elder Porphyrios". He seems to be somehow notable at least among the Greek Orthodox Church (we need to be aware we haven't examined Greek alphabet results yet). --Aphaia 20:41, 12 August 2005 (UTC)

title: Talk:Porphyrios Bairaktaris


text:
Talk:Robert T. Oliver

Google results sugested this person might be a notable historian. --Aphaia 20:52, 12 August 2005 (UTC)

title: Talk:Robert T. Oliver


text:
Rory Bremner

Rory Bremner, FKC (born 6 April 1961, Edinburgh, Scotland) is a Scottish impressionist and comedian, known for his political satire.

On the imminent Iraq war (2003)

 * (as Tony Blair): "Look we believe Saddam has weapons of mass destruction. Now if we don't attack him, then he might not use them, and in that case we'll never know whether he's got them or not. And you know, that's not a risk I'm prepared to take. Besides if we do conquer Iraq, and remove Saddam Hussein, there's a chance we could win the Nobel Peace Prize, and you know, frankly, isn't that something worth going to war for?"
 * Bremner (as himself): "But let's be clear. We're talking about a country where there's no opposition. As leader he can ignore Parliament and - sorry that's Tony Blair isn't it? Um, so he doesn't even have to ask the country before he goes to war - sorry that's still Tony Blair. No, the difference is Saddam rules Iraq through a combination of terror and brutality, backed up by a vicious regime of intimidation and torture - or is that David Blunkett? As absolute ruler Saddam recently claimed 100% victory in a Presidential Election." John Fortune: "Although that's not surprising, given that voters were accompanied into the booths by Saddam's Ba'ath party officials, and given a choice between voting for Saddam or voting for their wives and children to be killed, and their houses to be burnt down." Bremner (as Peter Snow): "And just a bit of fun, just a bit of fun, even small children were counted as supporters on the principle that you might as well throw in the baby with the Ba'ath voter."
 * (as himself): "So to recap: we may or may not be going to war with Iraq because Saddam may or may not have weapons of mass destruction, which he may or may not use, or pass to other terrorists groups with whom he may or may not have links."
 * (as himself): "Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are much like Nancy Dell'Olio and Ulrika Jonsson: they can't stand each other, but they both enjoy fucking the same bloke."
 * All from "Between Iraq and a Hard Place", Channel 4, January 5, 2003.

 * (as himself): "Multimedia? As far as I’m concerned, it’s reading with the radio on."
 * Cited in Introduction to Multimedia Retrieval by Remco Veltkamp

title: Rory Bremner


text:
Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne (4 July 1804 – 19 May 1864) was an American writer remembered for his romance novels (The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun) and short stories.

Quotes

 * If his inmost heart could have been laid open, there would have been discovered that dream of undying fame, which, dream as it is, is more powerful than a thousand realities.
 * "Fanshawe" (1828)

 * In old times, the settlers used to be astounded by the inroads of the northern Indians, coming down upon them from this mountain rampart, through some defile known only to themselves. It is indeed a wondrous path. A demon, it might be fancied, or one of the Titans, was travelling up the valley, elbowing the heights carelessly aside as he passed, till at length a great mountain took its stand directly across his intended road. He tarries not for such an obstacle, but rending it asunder, a thousand feet from peak to base, discloses its treasures of hidden minerals, its sunless waters, all the secrets of the mountain's inmost heart, with a mighty fracture of rugged precipices on each side. This is the Notch of the White Hills. Shame on me, that I have attempted to describe it by so mean an image — feeling, as I do, that it is one of those symbolic scenes, which lead the mind to the sentiment, though not to the conception, of Omnipotence.
 * "Sketches from Memory": The Notch of the White Mountains (1835)

 * Let us forget the other names of American statesmen, that have been stamped upon these hills, but still call the loftiest — WASHINGTON. Mountains are Earth's undecaying monuments. They must stand while she endures, and never should be consecrated to the mere great men of their own age and country, but to the mighty ones alone, whose glory is universal, and whom all time will render illustrious.
 * "Sketches from Memory": The Notch of the White Mountains (1835)

 * It is perilous to make a chasm in human affections; not that they gape so long and wide—but so quickly close again!
 * "Wakefield" (1835) from Twice Told Tales (1837, 1851)

 * Would Time but await the close of our favorite follies, we should all be young men, all of us, and until Doom's Day.
 * "Wakefield" (1835) from Twice Told Tales (1837, 1851)

 * Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever.
 * "Wakefield" (1835) from Twice Told Tales (1837, 1851)

 * Long, long may it be, ere he comes again! His hour is one of darkness, and adversity, and peril. But should domestic tyranny oppress us, or the invader's step pollute our soil, still may the Gray Champion come, for he is the type of New England's hereditary spirit; and his shadowy march, on the eve of danger, must ever be the pledge, that New England's sons will vindicate their ancestry.
 * "The Gray Champion" (1835) from Twice Told Tales (1837, 1851)

 * By the sympathy of your human hearts for sin ye shall scent out all the places — whether in church, bedchamber, street, field, or forest — where crime has been committed, and shall exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood spot.
 * "Young Goodman Brown" (1835) from Mosses from an Old Manse (1846)

 * "Lo, there ye stand, my children," said the figure, in a deep and solemn tone, almost sad with its despairing awfulness, as if his once angelic nature could yet mourn for our miserable race. "Depending upon one another's hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream. Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness. Welcome again, my children, to the communion of your race."
 * "Young Goodman Brown"

 * As the moral gloom of the world overpowers all systematic gaiety, even so was their home of wild mirth made desolate amid the sad forest.
 * "The Maypole of Merry Mount" (1836) from Twice-Told Tales (1837, 1851)

 * The young have less charity for aged follies than the old for those of youth.
 * "The Wedding Knell" (1837) from Twice-Told Tales (1837, 1851)

 * I have not lived, but only dreamed about living.
 * Letter to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (4 June 1837)

 * 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.
 * "The Hall of Fantasy" (1843) from Mosses from an Old Manse

 * She poured out the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of his spirit.
 * "The Birthmark" (1843) from Mosses from an Old Manse (1846)

 * Our Creator would never have made such lovely days, and have given us the deep hearts to enjoy them, above and beyond all thought, unless we were meant to be immortal.
 * "The Old Manse": The Author Makes the Reader Acquainted with His Abode from Mosses from an Old Manse (1846)

 * 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.
 * Twice-Told Tales, Preface (1851)

 * How slowly I have made my way in life! How much is still to be done! How little worth — outwardly speaking — is all that I have achieved! The bubble reputation is as much a bubble in literature as in war, and I should not be one whit the happier if mine were world-wide and time-long than I was when nobody but yourself had faith in me. The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and, lastly, the solid cash.
 * Letter to Horatio Bridge (15 March 1851)

 * When the Artist rises high enough to achieve the Beautiful, the symbol by which he makes it perceptible to mortal senses becomes of little value in his eyes, while his spirit possesses itself in the enjoyment of the reality.
 * As quoted in "Hawthorne and His Mosses" (1851) by Herman Melville

 * 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.
 * The Snow-Image, and Other Tales, Preface (1852)

 * 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.
 * Letter to William D. Ticknor (9 January 1855)

"The Artist of the Beautiful" (1844)
And there he sat, in strange despair, until his lamp flickered in the socket and left the Artist of the Beautiful in darkness.
 * "Heaven! What have I done?" exclaimed he. "The vapor, the influence of that brute force,—it has bewildered me and obscured my perception. I have made the very stroke—the fatal stroke—that I have dreaded from the first. It is all over—the toil of months, the object of my life. I am ruined!"

 * Thus it is that ideas, which grow up within the imagination and appear so lovely to it and of a value beyond whatever men call valuable, are exposed to be shattered and annihilated by contact with the practical. It is requisite for the ideal artist to possess a force of character that seems hardly compatible with its delicacy; he must keep his faith in himself while the incredulous world assails him with its utter disbelief; he must stand up against mankind and be his own sole disciple, both as respects his genius and the objects to which it is directed.

 * In a word, the heavy weight upon his spirits kept everything in order, not merely within his own system, but wheresoever the iron accents of the church clock were audible.

 * Only get rid altogether of your nonsensical trash about the beautiful, which I nor anybody else, nor yourself to boot, could ever understand,—only free yourself of that, and your success in life is as sure as daylight.
 * as spoken by Peter Hovenden

 * There was nothing so antipodal to his nature as this man's cold, unimaginative sagacity, by contact with which everything was converted into a dream except the densest matter of the physical world.

 * You are my evil spirit... you and the hard course world!
 * as spoken by Owen Warland

 * Alas that the artist... may not content himself with the inward enjoyment of the beautiful, but must chase the fitting mystery beyond the verge of his ethereal domain, and crush its frail being in seizing it with a material grasp. Owen Warland felt the impulse to give external reality to his ideas as irresistibly as any of the poets or painters who have arrayed the world in a dimmer and fainter beauty, imperfectly copied from the richness of their visions.

 * To persons whose pursuits are insulated from the common business of life—who are either in advance of mankind or apart from it—there often comes a sensation of moral cold that makes the spirit shiver as if it had reached the frozen solitudes around the pole. What the prophet, the poet, the reformer, the criminal, or any other man with human yearnings, but separated from the multitude by a peculiar lot, might feel, poor Owen felt.

 * Somewhat of a babbler, indeed, did people begin to think him; for he was apt to discourse at wearisome length of marvels of mechanism that he had read about... Among them he enumerated the Man of Brass, constructed by Albertus Magnus, and the Brazen Head of Friar Bacon... the automata of a little coach and horses, which it was pretended had been manufactured for the Dauphin of France; together with an insect that buzzed about the ear like a living fly... a duck that waddled, and quacked, and ate... In his idle and dreamy days he had considered it possible... to spiritualize machinery... a beauty that should attain to the ideal which Nature proposed to herself in all her creatures...

 * So long as we love life for itself, we seldom dread the losing it. When we desire life for the attainment of an object, we recognize the frailty of its texture. But, side by side with this sense of insecurity, there is a vital faith in our invulnerability to the shaft of death while engaged in any task that seems assigned by Providence as our proper thing to do, and which the world would have cause to mourn for should we leave it unaccomplished.

 * Can the philosopher, big with the inspiration of an idea that is to reform mankind, believe that he is to be beckoned from this sensible existence at the very instant when he is mustering his breath to speak the word of light? Should he perish so, the weary ages must pass away—the world's, whose life sand may fall, drop by drop—before another intellect is prepared to develop the truth that might have been uttered then. But history affords many an example where the most precious spirit... has gone hence... The prophet dies, and the man of torpid heart and sluggish brain lives on. The poet leaves his song half sung, or finishes it, beyond the scope of mortal ears... The painter—as Allston did—leaves half his conception on the canvas to sadden us with its imperfect beauty, and goes to picture forth the whole... in the hues of heaven. But rather such incomplete designs of life will be perfected nowhere. This so frequent abortion of man's dearest projects must be taken as proof that the deeds of earth, however etherealized by piety or genius, are without value, except as exercises and manifestations of the spirit.

 * In heaven, all ordinary thought is higher and more melodious than Milton's song. Then, would he add another verse to any strain that he had left unfinished here?

 * "But is it alive?" exclaimed she again; and the finger on which the gorgeous mystery had alighted was so tremulous that the butterfly was forced to balance himself with his wings. "Tell me if it be alive, or whether you created it. But"—and here his countenance somewhat changed—"this butterfly is not now to me what it was when I beheld it afar off in a daydream of my youth."

 * He knew that the world, and Annie as the representative of the world, whatever praise might be bestowed, could never say the fitting word nor feel the fitting sentiment which should be the perfect recompense of an artist who, symbolizing a lofty moral by a material trifle,—converting what was earthly to spiritual gold,—had won the beautiful into his handiwork. Not at this latest moment was he to learn that the reward of all high performance must be sought within itself, or sought in vain.

 * As if the butterfly, like the artist, were conscious of something not entirely congenial in the child's nature, it alternately sparkled and grew dim. At length it arose from the small hand of the infant with an airy motion that seemed to bear it upward without an effort, as if the ethereal instincts with which its master's spirit had endowed it impelled this fair vision involuntarily to a higher sphere. Had there been no obstruction, it might have soared into the sky and grown immortal. But its lustre gleamed upon the ceiling; the exquisite texture of its wings brushed against that earthly medium; and a sparkle or two, as of stardust, floated downward and lay glimmering on the carpet.

 * The blacksmith, by main force, unclosed the infant's hand, and found within the palm a small heap of glittering fragments, whence the mystery of beauty had fled forever. ...Owen Warland ...looked placidly at what seemed the ruin of his life's labor, and which was yet no ruin. He had caught a far other butterfly than this. When the artist rose high enough to achieve the beautiful, the symbol by which he made it perceptible to mortal senses became of little value in his eyes while his spirit possessed itself in the enjoyment of the reality.

"" (1850)

 * originally titled "The Unpardonable Sin" in The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales

 * Poets have imagined no utterance of fiends or hobgoblins so fearfully appropriate as a laugh. And even the obtuse lime-burner felt his nerves shaken, as this strange man looked inward at his own heart, and burst into laughter that rolled away into the night, and was indistinctly reverberated among the hills.

Hold! hold!" cried he, with a tremulous attempt to laugh; for he was ashamed of his fears, although they overmastered him. "Don't, for mercy's sake, bring out your Devil now!" "Man!" sternly replied Ethan Brand, "what need have I of the Devil? I have left him behind me, on my track. It is with such half-way sinners as you that he busies himself. Fear not, because I open the door. I do but act by old custom, and am going to trim your fire, like a lime-burner, as I was once." He stirred the vast coals, thrust in more wood, and bent forward to gaze into the hollow prison-house of the fire, regardless of the fierce glow that reddened his face. The lime-burner sat watching him, and half suspected this strange guest of a purpose, if not to evoke a fiend, at least to plunge into the flames, and thus vanish from the sight of man. Ethan Brand, however, drew quietly back, and closed the door of the kiln. "I have looked," said he, "into many a human heart that was seven times hotter with sinful passions than yonder furnace is with fire. But I found not there what I sought. No, not the Unpardonable Sin!"
 * While the lime-burner was struggling with the horror of these thoughts, Ethan Brand rose from the log, and flung open the door of the kiln. The action was in such accordance with the idea in Bertram's mind, that he almost expected to see the Evil One issue forth, red-hot, from the raging furnace.

 * "What is the Unpardonable Sin?" asked the lime-burner; and then he shrank farther from his companion, trembling lest his question should be answered. "It is a sin that grew within my own breast," replied Ethan Brand, standing erect with a pride that distinguishes all enthusiasts of his stamp. "A sin that grew nowhere else! The sin of an intellect that triumphed over the sense of brotherhood with man and reverence for God, and sacrificed everything to its own mighty claims!

"They tell me you have been all over the earth," said he, wringing his hands with earnestness. "You must have seen my daughter, for she makes a grand figure in the world, and everybody goes to see her. Did she send any word to her old father, or say when she was coming back?" Ethan Brand's eye quailed beneath the old man's. That daughter, from whom he so earnestly desired a word of greeting, was the Esther of our tale, the very girl whom, with such cold and remorseless purpose, Ethan Brand had made the subject of a psychological experiment, and wasted, absorbed, and perhaps annihilated her soul, in the process.
 * The white-haired father now approached Ethan Brand, and gazed steadily into his face.

 * He remembered how the night dew had fallen upon him,—how the dark forest had whispered to him,—how the stars had gleamed upon him,—a simple and loving man, watching his fire in the years gone by, and ever musing as it burned. He remembered with what tenderness, with what love and sympathy for mankind, and what pity for human guilt and woe, he had first begun to contemplate those ideas which afterwards became the inspiration of his life; with what reverence he had then looked into the heart of man, viewing it as a temple originally divine, and, however desecrated, still to be held as sacred to a brother; with what awful fear he had deprecated the success of his pursuit, and prayed that the Unpardonable Sin might never be revealed to him. Then ensued the base intellectual development which, in its progress, disturbed the counterpoise between his mind and heart.

Thus Ethan Brand became a fiend. He began to be so from the moment that his moral nature had ceased to keep the pace of improvement with his intellect.
 * [H]e was now a cold observer, looking on mankind as the subject of his experiment, and, at length, converting man and woman to be his puppets, and pulling the wires that moved them to such degrees of crime as were demanded by his study.

 * Scattered... over the breasts of the surrounding mountains there were heaps of hoary mist, in fantastic shapes... or cloud, hovering in the gold radiance of the upper atmosphere. ...[I]t seemed almost as if mortal man might thus ascend into the heavenly regions. Earth was so mingled with sky... The great hills played a concert among themselves, each constituting a strain of airy sweetness.

"Was the fellow's heart made of marble?" cried Bertram... "At any rate, it is burnt into what looks like a special good lime... my kiln is half a bushel the richer for him." ... [T]he rude lime-burner lifted his pole, and, letting it fall upon the skeleton, the relics of Ethan Brand were crumbled into fragments.
 * The marble was all burnt into perfect, snow-white lime. But on its surface, in the midst of the circle,—snow-white too, and thoroughly converted into lime,—lay a human skeleton, in the attitude of a person who, after long toil, lies down to long repose. Within the ribs—strange to say—was the shape of a human heart.

The American Notebooks (1835 - 1853)

 * Passages from the American Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1868) by Sophia Hawthorne, earlier published in The Atlantic Monthly, vol. 18, no. 110, December 1866 and The Atlantic Monthly, vol. 18, no. 107, September 1866

 * Every individual has a place to fill in the world, and is important, in some respect, whether he chooses to be so or not.
 * 1836

 * We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream: it may be so the moment after death.
 * 1836

 * What would a man do, if he were compelled to live always in the sultry heat of society, and could never bathe himself in cool solitude?
 * 1836

 * Moonlight is sculpture; sunlight is painting.
 * 1838

 * I do detest all offices — all, at least, that are held on a political tenure. And I want nothing to do with politicians. Their hearts wither away, and die out of their bodies. Their consciences are turned to india-rubber, or to some substance as black as that, and which will stretch as much.
 * 1840

 * I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house.
 * 1842

 * 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.
 * 1848

 * Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it.
 * 1851

 * Caresses, expressions of one sort or another, are necessary to the life of the affections as leaves are to the life of a tree. If they are wholly restrained, love will die at the roots.
 * 1853

The English Notebooks (1853 - 1858)

 * Passages from the English Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1870) by Sophia Hawthorne

 * Nervous and excitable persons need to talk a great deal, by way of letting off their steam.
 * December 1853

 * 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.
 * January 1854

 * A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats. You may strip off the outer ones without doing much mischief, perhaps none at all; but you keep taking off one after another, in expectation of coming to the inner nucleus, including the whole value of the matter. It proves, however, that there is no such nucleus, and that chastity is diffused through the whole series of coats, is lessened with the removal of each, and vanishes with the final one which you supposed would introduce you to the hidden pearl.
 * 16 March 1854

The Scarlet Letter (1850)

 * It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate.
 * Introduction: The Custom-House

 * It is a good lesson — though it may often be a hard one — for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world’s dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of all significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at.
 * Introduction: The Custom-House

 * If a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.
 * Introduction: The Custom-House

 * The moment when a man's head drops off is seldom or never, I am inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of his life. Nevertheless, like the greater part of our misfortunes, even so serious a contingency brings its remedy and consolation with it, if the sufferer will but make the best, rather than the worst, of the accident which has befallen him.
 * Introduction: The Custom-House

 * In view of my previous weariness of office, and vague thoughts of resignation, my fortune somewhat resembled that of a person who should entertain an idea of committing suicide, and, altogether beyond his hopes, meet with the good hap to be murdered.
 * Introduction: The Custom-House

 * The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.
 * Chapter I: The Prison Door

 * On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A.
 * Chapter II: The Market-Place

 * 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.
 * Chapter II: The Market-Place

 * 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.
 * Chapter III: The Recognition

 * 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.
 * Chapter IV: The Interview

 * 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.
 * Chapter V: Hester at Her Needle

 * Wherever there is a heart and an intellect, the diseases of the physical frame are tinged with the peculiarities of these.
 * Chapter IX: The Leech

 * Trusting no man as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy when the latter actually appeared.
 * Chapter X: The Leech and His Patient

 * A pure hand needs no glove to cover it.
 * Chapter XII: The Minister's Vigil

 * Let the black flower blossom as it may!
 * Chapter XIV: Hester and the Physician

 * Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart.
 * Chapter XV: Hester and Pearl

 * "Never, never!" whispered she. "What we did had a consecration of its own."
 * Chapter XVII: The Pastor and His Parishioner

 * 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.
 * Chapter XVIII: A Flood of Sunshine

 * Love, whether newly born, or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the outward world.
 * Chapter XVIII: A Flood of Sunshine

 * No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.
 * Chapter XX: The Minister in a Maze

 * 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!"
 * Chapter XXIV: Conclusion

 * It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual life upon another; each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his object.
 * Chapter XXIV: Conclusion

The House of the Seven Gables (1851)

 * Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose, at which they profess to aim their works. Not to be deficient in this particular, the author has provided himself with a moral, — the truth, namely, that the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief; and he would feel it a singular gratification if this romance might effectually convince mankind — or, indeed, any one man — of the folly of tumbling down an avalanche of ill-gotten gold, or real estate, on the heads of an unfortunate posterity, thereby to maim and crush them, until the accumulated mass shall be scattered abroad in its original atoms. In good faith, however, he is not sufficiently imaginative to flatter himself with the slightest hope of this kind. When romances do really teach anything, or produce any effective operation, it is usually through a far more subtile process than the ostensible one. The author has considered it hardly worth his while, therefore, relentlessly to impale the story with its moral as with an iron rod, — or, rather, as by sticking a pin through a butterfly, — thus at once depriving it of life, and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural attitude. A high truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and skilfully wrought out, brightening at every step, and crowning the final development of a work of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is never any truer, and seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first.
 * Preface

 * 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.
 * Ch. I : The Old Pyncheon Family

 * The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a human countenance, bearing the traces not merely of outward storm and sunshine, but expressive also, of the long lapse of mortal life, and accompanying vicissitudes that have passed within. Were these to be worthily recounted, they would form a narrative of no small interest and instruction, and possessing, moreover, a certain remarkable unity, which might almost seem the result of artistic arrangement.
 * Ch. I : The Old Pyncheon Family

 * God will give him blood to drink!
 * Ch. I : The Old Pyncheon Family

 * Life is made up of marble and mud.
 * Ch. II : The Little Shop-Window

 * What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!
 * Ch. XI : The Arched Window

 * Is it a fact — or have I dreamt it — that by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence: or shall we say it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we dreamed it.
 * Ch. XVII : The Flight of Two Owls

 * The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.
 * Ch. XX : The Flower of Eden

 * Of all the events which constitute a person's biography, there is scarcely one — none, certainly, of anything like a similar importance — to which the world so easily reconciles itself as to his death.
 * Ch. XXI : The Departure

The Blithedale Romance (1852)

 * The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom to know when it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed.
 * Ch. II : Blithedale

 * I seriously wished—selfish as it may appear—that the reformation of society had been postponed about half a century, or, at all events, to such a date as should have put my intermeddling with it entirely out of the question.
 * Ch. VI : Coverdale's Sick-Chamber

 * What, in the name of common-sense, had I to do with any better society than I had always lived in? It had satisfied me well enough. My pleasant bachelor-parlor, sunny and shadowy, curtained and carpeted, with the bedchamber adjoining... my evening at the billiard club, the concert, the theatre, or at somebody's party, if I pleased - what could be better than all this?  Was it better to hoe, to mow, to toil and moil amidst the accumulations of a barnyard; to be the chambermaid of two yoke of oxen and a dozen cows; to eat salt beef, and earn it with the sweat of my brow, and thereby take the tough morsel out of some wretch's mouth, into whose vocation I had thrust myself?
 * Ch. VI : Coverdale's Sick-Chamber

 * Hollingworth's more than brotherly attendance gave me inexpressible comfort. Most men - and certainly I could not always claim to be one of the exceptions - have a natural indifference, if not an absolute hostile feeling, towards those whose disease, or weakness, or calamity of any kind causes to falter or faint among the rude jostle of our existence. The education of Christianity, it is true, the sympathy of a like experience and the example of women, may soften and, possibly, subvert this ugly characteristic of our sex; but it is originally there, and has likewise its analogy in the practice of our brute brethren, who hunt the sick and disabled member of the herd from among them, as an enemy. It is for this reason that the stricken deer goes apart, and the sick lion grimly withdraws into his den. Except in love, or the attachments of kindred, or other very long and habitual affection, we really have no tenderness. But there was something of the woman moulded into the great, stalwart frame of Holligsworth; nor was he ashamed of it, as men often are of what is best in them, nor seemed ever to know that there was such a soft place in his heart. I knew it well, however, at that time, although afterwards it came nigh to be forgotten. Methought there could not be two such men alive as Holligsworth. There never was any blaze of a fireside that warmed and cheered me, in the down—sinkings and shiverings of my spirit, so effectually as did the light out of those eyes, which lay so deep and dark under his shaggy brows. Happy the man that has such a friend beside him when he comes to die! ...How many men, I wonder, does one meet with in a lifetime, whom he would choose for his deathbed companions! It still impresses me as almost a matter of regret that I did not die then, when I had tolerably made up my mind to it; for Holligsworth would have gone with me to the hither verge of life, and have sent his friendly and hopeful accents far over on the other side, while I should be treading the unknown path.
 * Ch. VI : Coverdale's Sick-Chamber

 * It is because the spirit is inestimable that the lifeless body is so little valued.
 * Ch. XXVIII : Blithedale Pasture

The Marble Faun (1860)

 * 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. It will be very long, I trust, before romance writers may find congenial and easily handled themes, either in the annals of our stalwart republic, or in any characteristic and probable events of our individual lives. Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens and wallflowers need ruin to make them grow.
 * Preface

 * Nobody has any conscience about adding to the improbabilities of a marvelous tale.
 * Chapter IV: The Spectre of the Catacomb

 * It is a suggestive idea to track those worn feet backward through all the paths they have trodden ever since they were the tender and rosy little feet of a baby, and (cold as they now are) were kept warm in his mother's hand.
 * Chapter XXI: The Dead Capuchin

 * We do ourselves wrong, and too meanly estimate the Holiness above us, when we deem that any act or enjoyment, good in itself, is not good to do religiously.
 * Chapter XXXII: Scenes by the Way

 * 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.
 * Chapter XXXIII: Pictured Windows

 * When we have once known Rome, and left her […], we are astonished by the discovery, by-and-by, that our heartstrings have mysteriously attached themselves to the Eternal City, and are drawing us thitherward again, as if it were more familiar, more ultimately our home, than even the spot where we were born.
 * Chapter XXXVI: Hilda's Tower
 * The opening and closing lines of the remarkable page-long sentence that constitutes the first paragraph of the chapter and suggests the deep fascination that Rome held for Hawthorne.

 * What a sweet reverence is that, when a young man deems his mistress a little more than mortal, and almost chides himself for longing to bring her close to his heart.
 * Chapter XL: Hilda and a Friend

 * Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed.
 * Chapter XLI: Snowdrops and Maidenly Delights

Disputed

 * Easy reading is damn hard writing.
 * Also attributed to Ernest Hemingway and others; the earliest definite occurrence of this yet found in research for Wikiquote is by Maya Angelou, who stated it in Conversations With Maya Angelou (1989) edited by Jeffrey M. Elliot:
 * I think it's Alexander Pope who says, "Easy writing is damn hard reading," and vice versa, easy reading is damn hard writing
 * The statement she referred to is most probably:
 * You write with ease, to show your breeding, But easy writing's curst hard reading
 * Clio's Protest, or the Picture Varnished (written 1771, published 1819) by Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Misattributed

 * Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty.
 * "Accuracy is twin brother to honesty, and inaccuracy to dishonesty." — Charles Simmons, Laconic Manual and Brief Remarker, containing over a thousand subjects alphabetically and systematically arranged (1852), p. 20: "Accuracy"

 * All brave men love; for he only is brave who has affections to fight for, whether in the daily battle of life, or in physical contests.
 * William Cowper Prime in The Old House by the River (1853); first misattributed to Hawthorne in Notable Thoughts about Women: A Literary Mosaic (1882) by Maturin Murray Ballou, p. 239

 * Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.
 * Willa Cather, "Four Letters: Escapism" first published in Commonweal (17 April 1936)

 * You can get assent to almost any proposition so long as you are not going to do anything about it.
 * John Jay Chapman, Practical Agitation (1900), ch.7

 * Happiness is like a butterfly: the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it comes and sits softly on your shoulder.
 * J. Richard Lessor, motivational posters in the 1970s produced by Argus Communications.

Quotes about Hawthorne

 * Alphabetized by author or source

 * Long ago Hawthorne called our attention to the fact that philanthropy ruins, or is fearfully apt to ruin, the heart, “the rich juices of which God never meant should be pressed violently out, and distilled into alcoholic liquor by an unnatural process; but it should render life sweet, bland and gently beneficent.”
 * Jane Addams, speech (1912)

 * Native American literature should be important to Americans not as a curio, an artifact of the American past that has little pertinence to an American present or future, but rather as a major tradition that informs American writers ranging from Cotton Mather and Nathaniel Hawthorne through Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and William Faulkner to Adrienne Rich, Toni Cade Bambara, and Judy Grahn.
 * Paula Gunn Allen The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986)

 * I am always so dazzled and bewildered with the richness, the depth, the … jewels of beauty in his productions that I am always looking forward to a second reading where I can ponder and muse and fully take in the miraculous wealth of thoughts.
 * Sophia Hawthorne, in her journal (14 January 1851)

 * Hawthorne's career was probably as tranquil and uneventful a one as ever fell to the lot of a man of letters; it was almost strikingly deficient in incident, in what may be called the dramatic quality. Few men of equal genius and of equal eminence can have led on the whole a simpler life... He produced, in quantity, but little. His works consist of four novels and the fragment of another, five volumes of short tales, a collection of sketches, and a couple of story-books for children. And yet some account of the man and the writer is well worth giving. Whatever may have been Hawthorne's private lot, he has the importance of being the most beautiful and most eminent representative of a literature. The importance of the literature may be questioned, but at any rate, in the field of letters, Hawthorne is the most valuable example of the American genius.
 * Henry James, in Hawthorne (1879)

 * I feel that I descended from Walt Whitman and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Virginia Woolf, and then a Chinese man told me how much Tripmaster Monkey reminded him of the Dream of the Red Chamber-and so they showed me that I have my roots in Chinese writing. I think that's good, that's very nice, to have roots that spread all over the world.
 * 1990 interview in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston (1998)

 * There in seclusion and remote from men The wizard hand lies cold, Which at its topmost speed let fall the pen, And left the tale half told.
 * Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in "Hawthorne" (1864)

 * It is curious, how a man may travel along a country road, and yet miss the grandest, or sweetest of prospects, by reason of an intervening hedge, so like all other hedges, as in no way to hint of the wide landscape beyond. So has it been with me concerning the enchanting landscape in the soul of this Hawthorne, this most excellent Man of Mosses.
 * Herman Melville, in "Hawthorne and His Mosses" (1851)

 * Where Hawthorne is known, he seems to be deemed a pleasant writer, with a pleasant style, — a sequestered, harmless man, from whom any deep and weighty thing would hardly be anticipated: — a man who means no meanings. But there is no man, in whom humor and love, like mountain peaks, soar to such a rapt height, as to receive the irradiations of the upper skies; — there is no man in whom humor and love are developed in that high form called genius; no such man can exist without also possessing, as the indispensable complement of these, a great, deep intellect, which drops down into the universe like a plummet. Or, love and humor are only the eyes, through which such an intellect views this world. The great beauty in such a mind is but the product of its strength.
 * Herman Melville, in "Hawthorne and His Mosses" (1851)

 * I found that but to glean after this man, is better than to be in at the harvest of others.
 * Herman Melville, in "Hawthorne and His Mosses" (1851)

 * The truth seems to be, that like many other geniuses, this Man of Mosses takes great delight in hoodwinking the world, — at least, with respect to himself. Personally, I doubt not, that he rather prefers to be generally esteemed but a so-so sort of author; being willing to reserve the thorough and acute appreciation of what he is, to that party most qualified to judge — that is, to himself. Besides, at the bottom of their natures, men like Hawthorne, in many things, deem the plaudits of the public such strong presumptive evidence of mediocrity in the object of them, that it would in some degree render them doubtful of their own powers, did they hear much and vociferous braying concerning them in the public.
 * Herman Melville, in "Hawthorne and His Mosses" (1851)

 * It is hard to be finite upon an infinite subject, and all subjects are infinite. By some people, this entire scrawl of mine may be esteemed altogether unnecessary, inasmuch, "as years ago" (they may say) "we found out the rich and rare stuff in this Hawthorne, whom you now parade forth, as if only yourself were the discoverer of this Portuguese diamond in our Literature." — But even granting all this; and adding to it, the assumption that the books of Hawthorne have sold by the five-thousand, — what does that signify? — They should be sold by the hundred-thousand, and read by the million; and admired by every one who is capable of Admiration.
 * Herman Melville, in "Hawthorne and His Mosses" (1851)

 * I became interested in the representation of the other. I started the novel mainly because of two germs. One was Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, a novel that I had to read for my Ph.D. and also for my teaching classes and that has always been a favorite book of mine. I was always more interested in Pearl, the "legacy of passion," than in Hester but then I also felt that the end of the book had also been subject to a Eurocentered decision on the part of some critics who simply assume that Pearl Prynne has married an European count and has gone to Europe after the events told in the story. They have assumed this because at the end of the book Pearl is sending to her Puritan mother in colonial Massachusetts all these very exotic presents with heraldic crests that could not be decoded.' Now, I thought that these heraldic crests should have been decoded if they were European, and then the more documents I read, the more I realized how much trading there was for the importation of objects, ideas, even people-freaks especially from the Coromandel Coast in India. So Pearl Prynne was one of the inspirations for my book.
 * 1994 interview in Conversations with Bharati Mukherjee Edited by Bradley C. Edwards (2009)

 * Suppose Jonathan Edwards had been born a woman; suppose William James, for that matter, had been born a woman? (The invalid seclusion of his sister Alice is suggestive.) Even from men, New England took its psychic toll; many of its geniuses seemed peculiar in one way or another, particularly along the lines of social intercourse. Hawthorne, until he married, took his meals in his bedroom, apart from the family...Emily Dickinson-viewed by her bemused contemporary Thomas Higginson as "partially cracked," by the twentieth century as fey or pathological-has increasingly struck me as a practical woman, exercising her gift as she had to, making choices.
 * Adrienne Rich On Lies, Secrets and Silence (1979)

title: Nathaniel Hawthorne