“There is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghostlike, the spot where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime; and still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it.”
More from Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit,…”
“She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom.”
“She was like a ghost that haunts a familiar fireside, unable to make itself seen or felt,…”
“Moonlight is sculpture; sunlight is painting.”