“She could no longer borrow from the future to help her through the present grief.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 1850, Ch. V: Hester at Her Needle

About Nathaniel Hawthorne

1804 – 1864

American novelist, author of "The Scarlet Letter".

“Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally.”

“It is perilous to make a chasm in human affections; not that they gape so long and wide—but so quickly close again!”

“Would Time but await the close of our favorite follies, we should all be young men, all of us, and until Doom's Day.”

“Death, like generation, is a secret of Nature.”

“If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.”

“No hour of life is lost that is spent in the saddle.”

“A witticism is an epigram on the death of a feeling.”

“Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end.”

“In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes!”