1. “Hold thy peace, dear little Pearl!” whispered her mother. “We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.”
2. “Indeed, the same dark question often rose into her mind with reference to the whole race of womanhood. Was existence worth accepting, even to the happiest among them?”
3. “It is remarkable that persons who speculate the most boldly often conform with the most perfect quietude to the external regulations of society.”
4. “…if truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a bosom…”
5. “Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era.”
6. “Love, whether newly born or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the outward world.”
7. “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.”
8. “A bodily disease, which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.”
9. “Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred.”
10. “They averred that the symbol was not mere scarlet cloth tinged in an earthly dyepot, but was red-hot with infernal fire, and could be seen glowing all alight whenever Hester Prynne walked abroad in the nighttime. And we must needs say it seared Hester’s bosom so deeply, that perhaps there was more truth in the rumor than our modern incredulity may be inclined to admit.”
11. “This feeble and most sensitive of spirits could do neither, yet continually did one thing or another, which intertwined, in the same inextricable knot, the agony of heaven-defying guilt and vain repentance.”
12. “She could no longer borrow from the future to help her through the present grief.”
13. “She could no longer borrow from the future to ease her present grief.”
14. “with a heart as full of reminiscences about her dead husband and children, and her dead friends of long ago, as a burial-ground is full of storied gravestones.”
15. “In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it… She stood apart from mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer make itself seen or felt.”
16. “Ever afterwards so touched, and so transfigured.”
17. “The sorrow that lay cold in her mother’s heart… converted it into a tomb.”
18. “The latter is perhaps the truest theory. She who has once been a woman, and ceased to be so, might at any moment become a woman again, if there were only the magic touch to effect the transformation. We shall see whether Hester Prynne were ever afterwards so touched and so transfigured.”
19. “I have no heavenly father.”
20. “Wondrous strength and generosity of a woman’s heart! She will not speak!”
21. “You speak, my friend, with a strange earnestness,” said old Roger Chillingworth, smiling at him.”
22. “She wanted–what some people want throughout life–a grief that should deeply touch her, and thus humanise and make her capable of sympathy.”
23. “Had I one friend, —or were it my worst enemy! —to whom, when sickened with the praises of all other men, I could daily betake myself, and be known as the vilest of all sinners, methinks my soul might keep itself alive thereby. Even thus much of truth would save me! But now, it is all falsehood! —all emptiness! —all death!”
24. “…Chillingworth was a striking evidence of man’s faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a reasonable space of time, undertake a devil’s office.”
25. “Life had never brought them a gloomier hour; it was the point whither their pathway had so long been tending, and darkening ever, as it stole along;—and yet it enclosed a charm that made them linger upon it, and claim another, and another, and, after all, another moment”
26. “But this had been a sin of passion, not of principle, nor even purpose.”
27. “Sometimes a light glimmered out of the physician’s eyes, burning blue and ominous, like the reflection of a furnace, or, let us say, like one of those gleams of ghastly fire that darted from Bunyan’s awful doorway in the hill-side, and quivered on the pilgrim’s face.”
28. “At the great judgment day, whispered the minister—and, strangely enough, the sense that he was a professional teacher of truth impelled him to answer the child so. Then, and there, before the judgment seat, thy mother, and thou, and I, must stand together. But the daylight of this world shall not see our meeting!”
29. “Or—but this more rarely happened—she would be convulsed with a rage of grief, and sob out her love for her mother, in broken words, and seem intent on proving that she had a heart, by breaking it.”
30. “Those who had before known her, and had expected to behold her dimmed and obscured by a disastrous cloud, were astonished, and even startled, to perceive how her beauty shone out, and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was enveloped. It may be true, that, to a sensitive observer, there was something exquisitely painful in it.”
31. “To the untrue man, the whole universe is false- it is impalpable- it shrinks to nothing within his grasp. And he himself is in so far as he shows himself in a false light, becomes a shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist.”
32. “Soon finding, however, that either she or the image was unreal, she turned elsewhere for better pastime.”
33. “I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!.”
34. “Let God punish! Thou shalt forgive!”
35. “…daily receiving the old physician in his study; or visiting the laboratory, and, for recreation’s sake, watching the processes by which weeds were converted into drugs of potency.”
36. “It was none the less a fact, however, that, in the eyes of the very men who spoke thus, the scarlet letter had the effect of the cross on a nun’s bosom.”
37. “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.”
38. “The moment when a man’s head drops off is seldom or never, I am inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of his life. Nevertheless, like the greater part of our misfortunes, even so serious a contingency brings its remedy and consolation with it, if the sufferer will but make the best, rather than the worst, of the accident which has befallen him.”
39. “They were, doubtless, good men, just and sage. But, out of the whole human family, it would not have been easy to select the same number of wise and virtuous persons, who should be less capable of sitting in judgment on an erring woman’s heart, and disentangling its mesh of good and evil, than the sages of rigid aspect towards whom Hester Prynne now turned her face.”
40. “It may serve, let us hope, to symbolise some sweet moral blossom that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.”
41. “In part, therefore, the attachment which I speak of is the mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust.”
42. “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.”
43. “Few secrets can escape an investigator who has opportunity and license to undertake such a quest and skill to follow it up.”
44. “But it is a strange experience, to a man of pride and sensibility, to know that his interests are within the control of individuals who neither love nor understand him”
45. “It is a good lesson – though it may often be a hard one – for a man… to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at.”
46. “It was not painful to behold this look; for, though dim, it had not the imbecility of decaying age.”
47. “…such loss of faith is ever one of the saddest results of sin.”
48. “A pure hand needs no glove to cover it.”
49. “Trusting no man as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy when the latter actually appeared.”
50. “Preach! Write! Act! Do anything, save to lie down and die!”
51. “We have yet to learn again the forgotten art of gayety.”
52. “Mine was the first wrong, when I betrayed thy budding youth into a false and unnatural relation with my decay.”
53. “Externally, the jollity of aged men has much in common with the mirth of children; the intellect, any more than a deep sense of humor, has little to do with the matter; it is, with both, a gleam that plays upon the surface, and imparts a sunny and cheery aspect alike to the green branch, and gray, mouldering trunk.”
54. “The truth seems to be, however, that the mother-forest, and these wild things which it nourished, all recognized a kindred wildness in the human child.”
55. “Be not silent from any mistaken pity and tenderness for him; for, believe me, Hester, though he were to step down from a high place, and stand there beside thee, on thy pedestal of shame, yet better were it so, than to hide a guilty heart through life.”
56. “We men of study, whose heads are in our books, have need to be straightly looked after! We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.”
57. “it is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom.”
58. “Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and re-planted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil.”
59. “Individuals in private life, meanwhile, had quite forgiven Hester Prynne for her frailty; nay, more, they had begun to look upon the scarlet letter as the token, not of that one sin for which she had borne so long and dreary a penance, but of her many good deeds since.”
60. “There are many things in this world that a child must not ask about.”
61. “If a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.”
62. “We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.”
63. “Pluck up a spirit, and do not be all the time sighing and murmuring!”
64. “The letter was the symbol of her calling. Such helpfulness was found in her, —so much power to do, and power to sympathize, —that many people refused to interpret the scarlet A by its original signification. They said that it meant Able; so strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman’s strength.”
65. “The judgment of God is on me, answered the conscience-stricken priest. It is too mighty for me to struggle with! Heaven would show mercy, rejoined Hester, hadst thou but the strength to take advantage of it.”
66. “tomorrow would bring its own trial with it so would the next day, and so would the next; each its own trial and yet the very same that was so now so unutterably grievous to be”
67. “A man burdened with a secret should especially avoid the intimacy of his physician.”
68. “I betrayed thy budding youth into a false and unnatural relation with my decay.”
69. “Mother and daughter stood together in the same circle of seclusion from human society;”
70. “The days of the far off future would toil onward, still with the same burden for her to take up and bear along with her but never to fling down; for the accumulating days, and added years would pile up their misery upon the heap of shame”
71. “He was not ill-fitted to be the head and representative of a community which owed its origin and progress, and its present state of development, not to the impulses of youth, but to the stern and tempered energies of manhood and the sombre sagacity of age; accomplishing so much, precisely because it imagined and hoped so little.”
72. “Had they taken her from me, I would willingly have gone with thee into the forest, and signed my name in the Black Man’s book too, and that with mine own blood!”
73. “No, my little Pearl! Thou must gather thine own sunshine. I have none to give thee.”
74. “Poor, miserable man! what right had infirmity like his to burden itself with crime? Crime is for the iron-nerved, who have their choice either to endure it, or, if it press too hard, to exert their fierce and savage strength for a good purpose, and fling it off at once!”
75. “But I never considered it as other than a transitory life.”
76. “Then, moreover, the white locks of age were sometimes found to be the thatch of an intellectual tenement in good repair.”
77. “It is remarkable, that persons who speculate the most boldly often conform with the most quietude to the external regulations of society. The thought suffices them, without investing itself in the flesh and blood of action”
78. “Yes! – these were her realities – all else had vanished!”
79. “It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual life upon another; each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his object.”
80. “Peace be with all the world! My blessing on my friends! My forgiveness to my enemies! For I am in the realm of quiet!”
81. “Pearl resembled the brook, inasmuch as the current of her life gushed from a wellspring as mysterious, and had flown through scenes shadowed as heavily with gloom. But, unlike the little stream, she danced and sparkled and prattled airily along her course.”
82. “Better to fast and pray upon it; and still better, it may be, to leave the mystery as we find it, unless Providence reveal it of its own accord.”
83. “All merely graceful attributes are usually the most evanescent.”
84. “The horrible ugliness of this exposure of a sick and guilty heart to the very eye that would gloat over it!”
85. “She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom”
86. “seize the public by the button,”
87. “In short, the almost torpid creatures of my own fancy twitted me with imbecility, and not without fair occasion.”
88. “Like all other joys, she rejected it as sin.”
89. “More than once, he had cleared his throat, and drawn in the long, deep, and tremulous breath, which, when sent forth again, would come burdened with the black secret of his soul.”
90. “The secrets that may be buried with a human heart.”
91. “But there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghostlike, the spot where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime; and still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it.”
92. “I shall do better amongst other faces; and these familiar ones, it need hardly be said, will do just as well without me.”
93. “Do anything, save to lie down and die!.”
94. “But, all this while, I was giving myself very unnecessary alarm. Providence had mediated better things for me than I could possibly imagine for myself.”
95. “let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will always be in her heart”
96. “The struggle, if it were one, need not be described.”
97. “It is a strange experience for a man of pride and feeling to know that his interests are in the control of strangers who don’t like or understand him.”
98. “It is to the credit of human nature that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates.”
99. “Moonlight, in a familiar room . . . is a medium the most suitable for a romance-writer.”
100. “Thou shalt forgive me! cried Hester, flinging herself on the fallen leaves beside him. Let God punish! Thou shalt forgive!”
101. “sometimes through that alchemy of quiet malice, by which women can concoct a subtle poison from ordinary trifles;”
102. “Just where she had paused, the brook chanced to form a pool so smooth and quiet that it reflected a perfect image of her little figure, with all the brilliant picturesqueness of her beauty, in its adornment of flowers and wreathed foliage…. It was strange, the way in which Pearl stood, looking so steadfastly at them through the dim medium of the forest gloom, herself, meanwhile, all glorified with a ray of sunshine….”
103. “Death was too definite an object to be wished for, or avoided.”
104. “Else, I should long ago have thrown off these garments of mock holiness, and have shown myself to mankind as they will see me at the judgment-seat. Happy are you, Hester, that wear the scarlet letter openly upon your bosom! Mine burns in secret! Thou little knowest what a relief it is, after the torment of a seven years’ cheat, to look into an eye that recognizes me for what I am!”
105. “A woman never overcomes these problems by any exercise of thought. They are not to be solved, or only in one way. If her heart chance to come uppermost, they vanish. Thus Hester Prynne, whose heart had lost its regular and healthy throb, wandered without a clue in the dark labyrinth of mind; now turned aside by an insurmountable precipice; now starting back from a deep chasm. There was wild and ghastly scenery all around her, and a home and comfort nowhere.”
106. “the little Puritans, being of the most intolerant brood that ever lived, had got a vague idea of something outlandish, unearthly”
107. “It contributes greatly towards a man’s moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate.”
108. “It was as if she had been made afresh out of new elements, and must perforce be permitted to live her own life and be a law unto herself without her eccentricities being reckoned to her for a crime.”
109. “Mindful, however, of her own errors and misfortunes, she early sought to impose a tender, but strict control over the infant immortality that was committed to her charge. But the task was beyond her skill.”
110. “they took long walks on the sea-shore, or in the forest; mingling various talk with the plash and murmur of the waves, and the solemn wind-anthem among the tree-tops.”
111. “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.”
112. “In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvelous 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.”
113. “The public is despotic in its temper; it is capable of denying common justice when too strenuously demanded as a right; but quite as frequently it awards more than justice, when the appeal is made, as despots love to have it made, entirely to its generosity.”
114. “Shall we not spend our immortal life together? Surely, surely, we have ransomed one another, with all this woe!”
115. “The secrets that may be buried with a human heart.”
