Quotations from
The Scarlet Letter by
Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850

She had wandered, without rule or guidance, into a moral wilderness.  Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods.  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.  ~XVIII A Flood of Sunshine

But this had been a sin of passion, not of principle, nor even purpose.  ~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.  ~XX The Minister in a Maze


One token of her shame would but poorly serve to hide another.  ~II The Market-Place


Ah, but let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be always in her heart.  ~II The Market-Place


Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart!  Else it may be their miserable fortune, when some mightier touch than their own may have awakened all her sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the marble image of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her as the warm reality.  ~XV Hester and Pearl


A pure hand needs no glove to cover it.  ~XII The Minister’s Vigil


In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvellous 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.  ~II The Market-Place


She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom.  ~XVIII A Flood of Sunshine


It is to the credit of human nature, that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates.  Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be transformed to love, unless the change be impeded by a continually new irritation of the original feeling of hostility.  ~XIII Another View of Hester

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