Friday, March 21, 2008

Quotes: Character (4)

The bold-face print is an interpretation of the quote that follows.

Character (4)
Character 1038 Witch. "There hobbles Goody Foster, a sour and bitter old beldam, looking as if she went to curse, and not to pray, and whom many of her neighbors suspect of taking an occasional airing on a broom stick." Hawthorne: “Main-Street”

Character 1051 "…he does not laugh like a man that is glad." Hawthorne:” Ethan Brand: A Chapter from an Abortive Romance”

Character 1059 A pipe lighted by the hell-fire of his swearing. "The doctor had an everlasting pipe in his mouth, and, as somebody said, in allusion to his habit of swearing, it was always alight with hell-fire." Hawthorne:” Ethan Brand: A Chapter from an Abortive Romance”

Character 1060 He called everybody "Captain." “ 'Oh, yes Captain' …whether as a matter of courtesy or craft, he styled everybody Captain…." Hawthorne:”Ethan Brand: A Chapter from an Abortive Romance”

Character 1078 The world progresses because of humble people doing as they should. "Not a day passed by, that the world was not the better because this man, humble as he was, had lived." Hawthorne: “The Great Stone Face”

Character 1081 A gifted statesman who achieved much, but whose life was empty because he had no ultimate purpose. "…the marvelously gifted statesman had always a weary gloom in the deep caverns of his eyes, as of a child that has outgrown its playthings, or a man of mighty faculties and little aims, whose life, with all its high performances, was vague and empty, because no high purpose had endowed it with reality." Hawthorne: “The Great Stone Face”

Character 1087 His head was as empty as the pots he sold. "…he [Mr. Lindsey] had a head as hard and impenetrable, and therefore perhaps as empty, as one of the iron pots which it was a part of his business [hardware] to sell." Hawthorne: “The Snow Image”

Character 1089 She retained her sense of poetry in spite of the realities of matrimony and motherhood. "The mother’s character…had a strain of poetry in it…that had survived out of her imaginative youth and still kept itself alive amid the dusty realities of matrimony and motherhood." Hawthorne: “The Snow Image”

Character 58 No one "finds" himself; people create themselves. "People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself; but the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates." Thomas Szasz. 1974. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

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