“Pleasant is a rainy winter's day, within doors! The best study for such a day, or the best amusement,—call it which you will,—is a book of travels, describing scenes the most unlike that sombre one”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, quote from Twice-Told Tales
“Yet perhaps the pale-faced congregation was almost as fearful a sight to the minister as his black veil to them.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, quote from Twice-Told Tales
“The subject had reference to secret sin and those sad mysteries which we hide from our nearest and dearest, and would fain conceal from our own consciousness, even forgetting that the Omniscient can detect them.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, quote from Twice-Told Tales
“I wonder he is not afraid to be alone with himself." "Men sometimes are so," said her husband.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, quote from Twice-Told Tales
“Thus from beneath the black veil there rolled a cloud into the sunshine, an ambiguity of sin or sorrow, which enveloped the poor minister, so that love or sympathy could never reach him.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, quote from Twice-Told Tales
“All through life that piece of crape had hung between him and the world; it had separated him from cheerful brotherhood and woman's love and kept him in that saddest of all prisons his own heart;”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, quote from Twice-Told Tales
“I look around me, and, lo! on every visage a black veil!”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, quote from Twice-Told Tales
“Pleasant is a rainy winter's day, within doors! The best study for such a day, or the best amusement,---call it which you will,--- is a book...”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, quote from Twice-Told Tales
“I know what to think when a young girl shivers by a warm hearth and complains of lonesomeness at her mother's side. Shall I put these feelings into words?”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, quote from Twice-Told Tales
“Perhaps a germ of love was springing in their hearts so pure that it might blossom in Paradise, since it could not be matured on earth;”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, quote from Twice-Told Tales
“If it be a sign of mourning," replied Mr. Hooper, "I, perhaps, like most other mortals, have sorrows dark enough to be typified by a black veil.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, quote from Twice-Told Tales
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Born place: in Salem, Massachusetts, The United States
Born date July 4, 1804
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“His suspicion that he was not going in the right direction tortmented him more and more. At last he had the conviction that he would never go anywhere but in the wrong direction, to the very end of the handful of days that was left to him, unhappy moonstruck pilgrim, whose April was to be cut off short.”
― Ismail Kadare, quote from Broken April
“« Dans nos écoles on nous enseigne le doute et l’art d’oublier. Avant tout l’oubli de ce qui est personnel et localisé. »
« — Personne ne peut lire deux mille livres. Depuis quatre siècles que je vis je n’ai pas dû en lire plus d’une demi-douzaine. D’ailleurs ce qui importe ce n’est pas de lire mais de relire. L’imprimerie, maintenant abolie, a été l’un des pires fléaux de l’humanité, car elle a tendu à multiplier jusqu’au vertige des textes inutiles.
— De mon temps à moi, hier encore, répondis-je, triomphait la superstition que du jour au lendemain il se passait des événements qu’on aurait eu honte d’ignorer. »
« — À cent ans, l’être humain peut se passer de l’amour et de l’amitié. Les maux et la mort involontaire ne sont plus une menace pour lui. Il pratique un art quelconque, il s’adonne à la philosophie, aux mathématiques ou bien il joue aux échecs en solitaire. Quand il le veut, il se tue. Maître de sa vie, l’homme l’est aussi de sa mort[30].
— Il s’agit d’une citation ? lui demandai-je.
— Certainement. Il ne nous reste plus que des citations. Le langage est un système de citations. »
Extrait de: Borges,J.L. « Le livre de sable. » / Utopie d’un homme qui est fatigué”
― Jorge Luis Borges, quote from The Book of Sand and Shakespeare's Memory
“One of the strongest motivations for rereading is purely selfish: it helps you remember what you used to be like. Open an old paperback, spangled with marginalia in a handwriting you outgrew long ago, and memories will jump out with as much vigor as if you’d opened your old diary. These book-memories, says Hazlitt, are “pegs and loops on which we can hang up, or from which we can take down, at pleasure, the wardrobe of a moral imagination, the relics of our best affections, the tokens and records of our happiest hours.” Or our unhappiest. Rereading forces you to spend time, at claustrophobically close range, with your earnest, anxious, pretentious, embarrassing former self, a person you thought you had left behind but who turns out to have been living inside you all along.”
― Anne Fadiman, quote from Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
“A plant similar to sorrel. The leaf can be chewed up and applied”
― Erin Hunter, quote from Secrets of the Clans
“It's a kind of arrogance to be so certain you're past redemption.”
― Ellis Peters, quote from A Morbid Taste for Bones
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Eleanor RigbyBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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