Prynne's Quotes

#1. Struggling woman, as yet only half his victim, that the outward guise of purity was but a lie, and that, if truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a bosom besides Hester Prynne's?

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#2. It hath evermore been the notorious badge of prostituted Strumpets and the lewdest Harlots, to ramble abroad to Plays, to Playhouses; whither no honest, chaste or sober Girls or Women, but only branded Whores and infamous Adulteresses, did usually resort in ancient times.

William Prynne

#3. luck was really stubbornness married to a knack for observation, a fluid sense of the truth, a sharp ear for lies, and a deeply suspicious nature. They'd

Michael Chabon

#4. Cancer is tangible. People feel compassion for you if you get cancer. Not so much if you're an alcoholic. And a mother who drinks? Forget it. Straight to hell. Big fat scarlet letter branded on our foreheads for life. Me and Hester Prynne? Same letter, different sins.

Amy Hatvany

#5. Some people are academically inclined, some vocationally and we shouldn't penalise the latter.

James Dyson

#6. Dancing serves no necessary use, no profitable, laudable, or pious end at all. It is only from the inbred pravity, vanity, wantonness, incontinency, pride, profaneness, or madness of man's depraved nature.

William Prynne

#7. I do like books on anatomy. I have to say I'm an amateur physician, I guess.

Tom Waits

#8. When you could get angry with someone and separate yourself from them, don't do that. If you have people who are difficult to deal with, be neither attracted nor repulsed. Go a step higher.

Frederick Lenz

#9. A woman with cut hair is a filthy spectacle, and much like a monsterit being natural and comely to women to nourish their hair, which even God and nature have given them for a covering, a token of subjection, and a natural badge to distinguish them from men.

William Prynne

#10. Nature is just to all mankind, and repays them for their industry. She renders them industrious by annexing rewards in proportion to their labor.

Baron De Montesquieu

#11. When I'm writing, I am trying to find out who I am, who we are, what we're capable of, how we feel, how we lose and stand up, and go on from darkness into darkness.

Maya Angelou

#12. But it was a remarkable attribute of this garb, and indeed, of the child's whole appearance, that it irresistibly and inevitably reminded the beholder of the token which Hester Prynne was doomed to wear upon her bosom. It was the scarlet letter in another form: the scarlet letter endowed with life!

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#13. A hundred years ago Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter was given an A for adultery; today she would rate no better than a C-plus.

Peter De Vries

#14. Individuals in private life, meanwhile, had quite forgiven Hester Prynne for her frailty; nay, more, they had begun to look upon the scarlet letter as the token, not of that one sin for which she had borne so long and dreary a penance, but of her many good deeds since.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#15. The latter is perhaps the truest theory. She who has once been a woman, and ceased to be so, might at any moment become a woman again, if there were only the magic touch to effect the transformation. We shall see whether Hester Prynne were ever afterwards so touched and so transfigured.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#16. And you yourself always be seated at the middle fo the high table that your presence as lord or lady may appear openly to all, and that you may plainly see on either side all the service and all the faults.

Robert Grosseteste

#17. As a creator, I always want to betray fans' expectations.

Hideo Kojima

#18. Believe it or not, I loved acid rock in college - and I still do.

Condoleezza Rice

#19. Human nature exists and operates in an environment. And it is not 'in' that environment as coins are in a box, but as a plant is in the sunlight and soil.

John Dewey