The House of the Seven Gables

By Nathaniel Hawthorne QUOTATION: The world, that gray-bearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without being venerable.
ATTRIBUTION: Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), U.S. author. The House of the Seven Gables, ch. 12 (1851).

QUOTATION: Is it a fact—or have I dreamt it—that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?
ATTRIBUTION: Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), U.S. author. Clifford Pyncheon, in The House of the Seven Gables, ch. 17 (1851).

QUOTATION: Man’s own youth is the world’s youth; at least he feels as if it were, and imagines that the earth’s granite substance is something not yet hardened, and which he can mould into whatever shape he likes.
ATTRIBUTION: Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), U.S. author. The House of the Seven Gables, ch. 12 (1851).

QUOTATION: When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the probable and ordinary course of man’s experience. The former—while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart—has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation. If he thinks fit, also, he may so manage his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture.
ATTRIBUTION: Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), U.S. novelist. House of the Seven Gables, preface (1851).