Max Hawthorne Quotes

“The secret to my success is actually simple: I failed so many times that succeeding eventually became a mathematical certainty.”

“To make love last, you've got to treat it like the ultimate poker hand; you've got to go all in.”

“I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne.”

“When Jean and his mother left Etreuilles, Monsieur Sureau had gathered for them great boxfuls of hawthorn and of snowballs which Madame Santeuil had not the courage to refuse. But, as soon as Jean's uncle had gone home, she threw them away, saying that they already had more than enough in the way of luggage. And then Jean cried because he had been separated from the darling creatures which he would have liked to take with him to Paris, and because of his mother's naughtiness.”

“Melville to Hawthorne: "In your stories, you seem to understand that the dramatic moments come not when a character must choose between right and wrong buy when he must choose between two wrongs.”

“The most beautiful thing about the world is how much is unknown to us. There are so many secrets, Hawthorn. So much awaiting discovery. We are merely dust motes in the vastness of the universe.”

“Pluck up a spirit, and do not be all the time sighing and murmuring!”

“(W.D.) Howells asserted that the Americans' 'love of the supernatural is their common inheritance from no particular ancestry.' Their fiction, he added, often gathers in the gray 'twilight of the reason,' on 'the borderland between experience and illusion." Howells's geographical metaphor was derived, of course, from Hawthorne's idea of a moonlit 'neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.' Whether literally, as in Cooper's The Spy, or metaphorically, as in Hawthorne's works, the neutral territory/borderland was the familiar setting of the American romance. As American writers came to realize, not only was there a borderland between East and West, civilization and wilderness, but also between the here and the hereafter, between conscious and unconscious, 'experience and illusion' - psychic frontiers on the edge of territories both enticing and terrifying.”

“It is good to know one's enemy.It is better to know one's self.”

“The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.”