Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-pern, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison.

A singular fact, that, when man is a brute, he is the most sensual and loathsome of all brutes.

The thing you set your mind on is the thing you ultimately become.

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

Do anything, save to lie down and die!

Nothing is more unaccountable than the spell that often lurks in a spoken word. A thought may be present to the mind, and two minds conscious of the same thought, but as long as it remains unspoken their familiar talk flows quietly over the hidden idea.

What is there so ponderous in evil, that a thumb's bigness of it should outweigh the mass of things not evil, which were heaped into the other scale!