The Scarlet Letter Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Could you be an old maid if you had worn the scarlet letter?

Kate Atkinson

#3. The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#4. Hypocrisy is the scarlet letter in politics.

Mark McKinnon

#5. Historically the Puritans left England to escape religious persecution, and they promptly turned around and started persecuting the people they didn't agree with - the scarlet letter A, and the stocks and the dunking board came from that. That puritanism is still there.

Hugh Hefner

#6. It [the scarlet letter] had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#7. CHAPTER XX. THE MINISTER IN A MAZE CHAPTER XXI. THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY CHAPTER XXII. THE PROCESSION CHAPTER XXIII. THE REVELATION OF THE SCARLET LETTER

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.

John Irving

#11. This is the new politics. Personal responsibility. Not leaving it to others. I am my planet's keeper.

Hilary Benn

#12. Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.

William Of Ockham

#13. Julia Louis-Dreyfus is just perfect in 'Veep.' She gets to show off the spiky claws beneath her patrician finesse. The obvious way to play 'Veep' would be to make Louis-Dreyfus a folksy heroine, one with more common sense or populist heart than her enemies. But she isn't one.

Rob Sheffield

#14. If truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a bosom ...

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#15. I'm a big James Bond fan. I've got a collection of them.

Heikki Kovalainen

#16. And finally there was the sleepless night
when i decided to explore and fight
the foul, the inadmissible abyss,
devoting all my twisted life to this
one task. today i'm sixty-one. waxwings
are berry-pecking. a cicada sings.

Vladimir Nabokov

#17. I want a sword to slit her end to end and then, with one hundred more cuts, dice her body into small pieces and leave the bloodied,quivering remains of skin, muscle, and soulless guts on her front lawn, arranged in a gruesome scarlet letter.

Julie Metz

#18. Pluck up a spirit, and do not be all the time sighing and murmuring!

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#19. 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

#20. The story was gradually taking shape. Pilon liked it this way. It ruined a story to have it all come out quickly. The good story lay in half-told things which must be filled in out of the hearer's own experience.

John Steinbeck

#21. I often felt like I was walking around with this Scarlet Letter stitched to my chest from the way that people treated me.

Toni Braxton

#22. 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

#23. The sunken ships were visible even on the bottom, for it seemed as if they had sunk along with their own space and time, so that they were still illumined by the same eleven o'clock sun that was shining on Saturday, June 9, when they went down.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#24. Twitter is sort of version of labeling, except with 140 characters instead of a labelmaker. It's the way of calling things out for what they are, wearing badges. Twitter is like the new Scarlet Letter.

Carrie Brownstein

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. If the truth were to be known, everyone would be wearing a scarlet letter of one form or another.

Nathaniel Hawthorne