The House of the Seven Gables Quotes

“Shall we never never get rid of this Past? ... It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so in exorable as one's self!”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“It is very queer, but not the less true, that people are generally quite as vain, or even more so, of their deficiencies than of their available gifts.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“Why are poets so apt to choose their mates, not for any similarity of poetic endowment, but for qualities which might make the happiness of the rudest handicraftsman as well as that of the ideal craftsman of the spirit? Because, probably, at his highest elevation, the poet needs no human intercourse; but he finds it dreary to descend, and be a stranger.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“I find nothing so singular to life as that everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually grapples with it.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the drowning-point.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“The influential classes, and those who take upon themselves to be leaders of the people, are fully liable to all the passionate error that has ever characterized the maddest mob.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“Life, within doors, has few pleasanter prospects than a neatly-arranged and well-provisioned breakfast-table.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“The sick in mind, and, perhaps, in body, are rendered more darkly and hopelessly so by the manifold reflection of their disease, mirrored back from all quarters in the deportment of those about them; they are compelled to inhale the poison of their own breath, in infinite repetition.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“... for when a man's spirit has been thoroughly crushed, he may be peevish at small offenses, but never resentful of great ones.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“Next to the lightest heart, the heaviest is apt to be most playful.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“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? Why, therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily be carried off with him? Why should he make himself a prisoner for life in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere,—in a better sense, wherever the fit and beautiful shall offer him a home?”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“A dead man sits on all our judgment seats; and living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in dead men's books! We laugh a dead men's jokes, and cry at dead men's pathos!”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“To plant a family! This idea is at the bottom of most of the wrong and mischief which men do. The truth is, that, once in every half century, at longest, a family should be merged into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its ancestors.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“Tradition,—which sometimes brings down truth that history has let slip, but is oftener the wild babble of the time, such as was formerly spoken at the fireside and now congeals in newspapers,—tradition is responsible for all contrary averments.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“When he is cheerful--when the sun shines into his mind--then I venture to peep in, just as far as the light reaches, but no further. It is holy ground where the shadow falls!”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“Possibly, he was in a state of second growth and recovery, and was constantly assimilating nutriment for his spirit and intellect from sights, sounds, and events which passed as a perfect void to persons more practised with the world. As all is activity and vicissitude to the new mind of a child, so might it be, likewise, to a mind that had undergone a kind of new creation, after its longsuspended life.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“I'm as provocative of tears as an onion!”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“What is called poetic insight is the gift of discerning, in this sphere of strangely-mingled elements, the beauty and the majesty which are compelled to assume a garb so sordid.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“Little Phoebe was one of those persons who possess, as their exclusive patrimony, the gift of practical arrangement. It is a kind of natural magic that enables these favored ones to bring out the hidden capabilities of things around them; and particularly to give a look of comfort and habitableness to any place which, for however brief a period, may happen to be their home. A wild hut of underbrush, tossed together by wayfarers through the primitive forest, would acquire the home aspect by one night's lodging of such a woman, and would retain it long after her quiet figure had disappeared into the surrounding shade.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“He had that sense, or inward prophecy,-- which a young man had better never have been born than not to have, and a mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquish,-- that we are not doomed to creep on forever in the old bad way, but that, this very now, there are harbingers abroad of a golden era, to be accomplished in his own lifetime.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“Strength is incomprehensible by weakness, and, therefore, the more terrible.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“Man’s own youth is the world’s youth; at least, he feels as if it were, and imagines that the earth’s granite substance is something not yet hardened, and which he can mould into whatever shape he likes. So it was with Holgrave. He could talk sagely about the world’s old age, but never actually believed what he said; he was a young man still, and therefore looked upon the world—that graybearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without being venerable—as a tender stripling, capable of being improved into all that it ought to be, but scarcely yet had shown the remotest promise of becoming. He had that sense, or inward prophecy, —which a young man had better never have been born than not to have, and a mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquish,—that we are not doomed to creep on forever in the old bad way, but that, this very now, there are the harbingers abroad of a golden era, to be accomplished in his own lifetime.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“You are partly crazy, and partly imbecile; a ruin, a failure, as almost everybody is,--though some in less degree, or less perceptibly, than their fellows.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“As a general rule, Providence seldom vouchsafes to mortals any more than just that degree of encouragement which suffices to keep them at a reasonably full exertion of their powers.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“The wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“In cases of distasteful occupation, the second day is generally worse than the first; we return to the rack with all the soreness of the preceding torture in our limbs.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“Jim Crow, moreover, was seen executing his world-renowned dance, in gingerbread.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“Clergymen, judges, statesmen--the wisest, calmest, holiest persons of their day--stood in the inner circle round about the gallows, loudest to applaud the work of blood, latest to confess themselves miserably deceived.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“He had a winged nature; she was rather of the vegetable kind, and could hardly be kept long alive, if drawn up by the roots. Thus it happened that the relation heretofore existing between her brother and herself was changed.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables