Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

There is nothing like the dead cold hand of the past to take down our tumid egotism and lead us into the solemn flow of the life of our race.

The proper time to influence the character of a child is about a hundred years before he is born.

I imagine the earth when I am no more: Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley. Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born, Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.

We move through places every day that would never have been if not for those who came before us. Our workplaces, where we spend so much time--we often think they began with our arrival. That's not true.

I cannot help leaving my books behind me whenever God calls me hence; but in every other respect, my own hands will be my executors.

Far too often, when we think we are frightened by mystery, the fact is that we are haunted by history.

We are not free, it was not intended we should be. A book of rules is placed in our cradle, and we never get rid of it until we reach our graves. Then we are free, and only then.

We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.

We are not buried in history, but surrounded by it. You can't avoid our behavior being shaped by it, to a considerable degree. We have this fantasy that we are free of history. This allows us not to see the circumstances, the historical circumstances of other people.

The use of history is to tell us what we are, for at our birth we are nearly empty vessels and we become what our tradition pours into us.

They, who passed away long ago, still exist in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as murmuring blood, and as gesture that rises up from the depths of time.

Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.

A man is the sum of his ancestors; to reform him you must begin with a dead ape and work downward through a million graves. He is like the lower end of a suspended chain; you can sway him slightly to the right or the left, but remove your hand and he falls into line with the other links.

We are born haunted, he said, his voice weak, but still clear. Haunted by our fathers and mothers and daughters, and by people we don't remember. We are haunted by otherness, by the path not taken, by the life unlived. We are haunted by the changing winds and the ebbing tides of history. And even as our own flame burns brightest, we are haunted by the embers of the first dying fire. But mostly, said Lord Jim, we are haunted by ourselves.

The power of the past to still dominate our thinking today.

For the anointed, traditions are likely to be seen as the dead hand of the past, relics of a less enlightened age, and not as the distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before.

Death lays his icy hand on kings.

And as she looked around, she saw how Death the consoler, Laying his hand upon many a heart, had healed it forever.

A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.

I'm not a comic book character. I'm not Indiana Jones or Bond, I'm a flesh and blood guy who is ageing and changing. I don't have to do what I did in '93. I couldn't do it and thank God.

It makes no difference to me whether I shoot you or you fall to your death.” “It does make a difference,” I said, my voice small but confident. “You and I share the same blood.” I lifted my hand precariously, showing him my birthmark. “I’m your descendant. If I sacrifice my blood, Patch will become human and you’ll die. It’s written in The Book of Enoch.

You might say that death has relaxed me.

Our characteristic response to the mutilated statue, the bronze dug up from the earth, is revealing. It is not that we prefer time-worn bas-reliefs, or rusted statuettes as such, nor is it the vestiges of death that grip us in them, but those of life. Mutilation is the scar left by the struggle with Time, and a reminder of it - Time which is as much a part of ancient works of art as the material they are made of, and thrusts up through the fissures, from a dark underworld, where all is at once chaos and determinism.

Doctrine once sown strikes deep its root, and respect for antiquity influences all men.

When men find they must inevitably perish, they willingly resolve to die with their comrades and with their arms in their hands.