While ‘The Scarlet Letter’ exemplifies the atmosphere of a New England autumn, and all those other ‘A’ words, this season I’m reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘The House of the Seven Gables’ for the first time, and it’s reinvigorated my love of classic literature – those tried and true works that have withstood the test of time as much for their written beauty as their evocation of how humans interact with one another.
“Nevertheless, if we look through all the heroic fortunes of mankind, we shall find the same entanglement of something mean and trivial with whatever is noblest in joy or sorrow. Life is made up of marble and mud. And, without all the deeper trust in a comprehensive sympathy above us, we might hence be led to suspect the insult of a sneer, as well as an immitigable frown, on the iron countenance of fate. What is called poetic insight is the gift of discerning, in this sphere of strangely mingled elements, the beauty and the majesty which are compelled to assume a garb so sordid.” – Nathaniel Hawthorne
“It is very queer, but not the less true, that people are generally quite as vain, or even more so, of their deficiencies than of their available gifts.” ~
“I’m as provocative of tears as an onion!” ~
