"Some attribute had departed from her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a woman. Such is frequently the fate, and such the stern development, of the feminine character and person, when the woman has encountered, and lived through, an experience of peculiar severity. If she be all tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or-and the outward semblance is the same-crushed so deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more."

"The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits."

"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."

"Might and wrong combined, like iron magnetized, are endowed with irresistible attraction."

"Preach! Write! Act! Do any thing, save to lie down and die!"

"Unfathomable to mere mortals is the lore of fiends."

"Shall we never never get rid of this Past? ... It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body."

"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."

"There are many things in this world that a child must not ask about."

"Nobody has any conscience about adding to the improbabilities of a marvelous tale."

"America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash."

"He seemed to be in quest for mental food, not heart sustenance."

"Sunlight is painting."

"When an uninstructed multitude attempts to see with its eyes, it is exceedingly apt to be deceived. When, however, it forms its judgment, as it usually does, on the intuitions of its great and warm heart, the conclusions thus attained are often so profound and so unerring as to possess the character of truth supernaturally revealed."

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

"Jim Crow, moreover, was seen executing his world-renowned dance, in gingerbread."

"A few feathery flakes are scattered widely through the air, and hover downward with uncertain flight, now almost alighting on the earth, now whirled again aloft into remote regions of the atmosphere."

"Our most intimate friend is not he to whom we show the worst, but the best of our nature."

"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!"

"Oh, for the years I have not lived, but only dreamed of living."

"O Fiend, whose talisman was that fatal symbol, wouldst thou leave nothing, whether in youth or age, for this poor sinner to revere?-such loss of faith is ever one of the saddest results of sin."

"The mind is in a sad state when Sleep, the all-involving, cannot confine her spectres within the dim region of her sway, but suffers them to break forth, affrighting this actual life with secrets that perchance belong to a deeper one."

"What's that you mutter to yourself, Matthew Maule?" asked Scicpio. "And what for do you look so black at me?""No matter, darky," said the carpenter. "Do you think nobody is to look black but yourself?"

"All have some artificial badge which the world, and themselves among the first, learn to consider as a genuine characteristic."

"He had been driven hither by the impulse of that Remorse which dogged him everywhere, and whose own sister and closely linked companion was that Cowardice which invariably drew him back, with her tremulous gripe, just when the other impulse had hurried him to the verge of a disclosure."

"Be it sin or no, I hate the man!"

"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."

"Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you."

"A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world."

"The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread."

"Pluck up a spirit, and do not be all the time sighing and murmuring!"

"Death should take me while I am in the mood."

"Many people are seeking, at this very moment, to shelter themselves under the wing of the federal eagle; imagining, I presume, that her bosom has all the softness and snugness of an eider-down pillow. But she has no great tenderness, even in her best of moods, and, sooner or later, --oftener sooner than late,-- is apt to fling off her nestlings with a scratch of her claw, a dab of her beak, or a rankling wound from her barbed arrows."

"There was a listlessness in his gait, as if he saw no reason for taking one step further, nor felt any desire to do so, but would have been glad, could he be glad of anything, to fling himself down at the root of the nearest tree, and lie there passive for evermore. The leaves might bestrew him, and the soil gradually accumulate and form a little hillock over his frame, no matter whether there were life in it or no. Death was too definite an object to be wished for or avoided."

"She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom."

"A bachelor always feels himself defrauded, when he knows or suspects that any woman of his acquaintance has given herself away."

"And as for Owen Warland, he 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."

"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."

"And Pearl, stepping in, mid-leg deep, beheld her own white feet at the bottom, while out of a still lower depth came the gleam of a kind of fragmentary smile, floating to and fro in the agitated water."

"Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you."

"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."

"But never had their youthful beauty seemed so pure and high, as when its glow was chastened by adversity."

"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."

"Nothing gives a sadder sense of decay than this loss or suspension of the power to deal with unaccustomed things, and to keep up with the swiftness of the passing moment."

"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."

"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."

"All that they lacked was the gift that descended upon the chosen disciples at Pentecost, in tongues of flame; symbolizing, it would seem, not the power of speech in foreign and unknown languages, but that of addressing the whole human brotherhood in the heart's native language."

"This was a freedom essential to the health even of a character so little susceptible of morbid influences as that of Phoebe. The old house [with dry rot in its structure and perhaps also in its inhabitants], ...it was not good to breathe no other atmosphere that that."

"Women derive a pleasure, incomprehensible to the other sex, from the delicate toil of the needle."

"There are few uglier traits of human nature than this tendency-which I now witnessed in men no worse than their neighbours-to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the power of inflicting harm."