Nathaniel Hawthorne Death Quotations

We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death.

Our Creator would never have made such lovely days, and have given us the deep hearts to enjoy them, above and beyond all thought, unless we were meant to be immortal.

Of all the events which constitute a person's biography, there is scarcely one ... to which the world so easily reconciles itself as to his death.

It is very singular how the fact of a man's death often seems to give people a truer idea of his character, whether for good or evil, than they have ever possessed while he was living and acting among them.

It is not strange that that early love of the heart should come back, as it so often does when the dim eye is brightening with its last light. It is not strange that the freshest fountains the heart has ever known in its wastes should bubble up anew when the lifeblood is growing stagnant. It is not strange that a bright memory should come to a dying old man, as the sunshine breaks across the hills at the close of a stormy day; nor that in the light of that ray, the very clouds that made the day dark should grow gloriously beautiful.

If human love hath power to penetrate the veil--and hath it not?--then there are yet living here a few who have the blessedness of knowing that an angel loves them.

Death possesses a good deal, of real estate, namely, the graveyard in every town.

Death is so genuine a fact that it excludes falsehoods, or betrays its emptiness; it is a touchstone that proves the gold, and dishonors the baser metal.

Death should take me while I am in the mood.