Scarlet Letter Quotes

“It's Nathaniel Hawthorne Month in English. Poor Nathaniel. Does he know what they've done to him? We're reading The Scarlet Letter one sentence at a time, tearing it up and chewing on its bones.
It's all about SYMBOLISM, says Hairwoman. Every word chosen by Nathaniel, every comma, every paragraph break -- these were all done on purpose. To get a decent grade in her class, we have to figure out what he was really trying to say. Why couldn't he just say what he meant? Would they pin scarlet letters on his chest? B for blunt, S for straightforward?”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak

“She felt just like that girl in that book with the letter A on her chest. Only her A signified Alone. She was an outcast, cast out by her own choices, an outsider with a pretty face. Like a rose, she may have been beautiful to look at, but almost everyone only knew the thorny side.”
― Victoria Kahler, Their Friend Scarlet

“Destroy! destroy! destroy! hums the under-consciousness. Love and produce! Love and produce! cackles the upper consciousness. And the world hears only the Love-and- produce cackle. Refuses to hear the hum of destruction under- neath. Until such time as it will have to hear.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“That little baggage hath witchcraft in her.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Ever afterwards so touched, and so transfigured.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlett Letter

“Throughout them all, giving up her individuality, she would become the general symbol at which the preacher and moralist might point, and in which they might vivify and embody their images of woman's frailty and sinful passion. Thus the young and pure would be taught to look at her, with the scarlet letter flaming on her breast-- at her, the child of honorable parents--at her, who had once been innocent---as the figure, the body, the reality of sin.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“Continually, and in a thousand other ways, did she feel the innumerable throbs of anguish that had been so cunningly contrived for her by the undying, the ever-active sentence of the Puritan tribunal. Clergymen paused in the street to address words of exhortation, that brought a crowd, with its mingled grin and frown, around the poor, sinful woman. If she entered a church, trusting to share the Sabbath smile of the Universal Father, it was often her mishap to find herself the text of the discourse.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“In giving her existence, a great law had been broken; and the result was a being, whose elements were perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all in disorder; or with an order peculiar to themselves, amidst which the point of variety and arrangement was difficult or impossible to be discovered.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“The scarlet letter had not done its office.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“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. Philosophically considered, therefore, the two passions seem essentially the same, except that one happens to be seen in a celestial radiance, and the other in a dusky and horrid glow. In the spiritual world, the old physician and the minister—mutual victims as they have been—may, unawares, have found their earthly stock of hatred and antipathy transmuted into golden love.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“Lady Shaded G by Stewart Stafford

This thorned rose is a perfumed pox,
Rumours dog her as contagion itself;
Breeding cherubs with batons sinister,
Her trail leads to noblest chambers.

Mothers warn sons not to mount,
This mare of the rampant night,
With dead eyes of a dark frontier,
Her black dress does smother all.

Fair Tiffany's skin flashes with iron,
Once seen, wantonness shadows,
Shady whispers inflame her temerity,
A rock for purple ships a-crashing.

© Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford