Life & Mortality Quote by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Hawthorne turns intimacy into botany, and it’s not a cute metaphor so much as a quiet threat. Caresses are not decorative flourishes on a solid relationship; they’re the mechanism by which feeling stays alive. By likening affection to a tree, he smuggles in a Puritan-era realism about human need: love isn’t a private, self-sustaining virtue you can lock in a chest. It’s a living thing with maintenance costs, and neglect isn’t morally neutral - it’s lethal.

The word “expressions” does a lot of work. Hawthorne isn’t only talking about sex or even touch; he’s broadening “caresses” into a whole ecology of reassurance: looks, words, small favors, physical closeness. That expansiveness matters in his cultural context, where outward displays of feeling could be viewed as indulgent or improper. He argues, slyly, that restraint can become its own kind of cruelty - a socially sanctioned starvation.

Then comes the sting: “die at the roots.” Not fade, not cool off, but rot from the source. Hawthorne’s fiction is crowded with characters punished by repression, secrecy, and the refusal to name desire; here he makes the emotional thesis explicit. The subtext is a rebuke to any ethic that prizes self-control over tenderness. You can keep love “pure” by withholding contact, he suggests, but you’ll also keep it from surviving. In Hawthorne’s moral universe, the tragedy isn’t wanting too much; it’s refusing to give the small, sustaining proofs that wanting is real.