Love Quote by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Hawthorne sells love not as a private feeling but as a force that leaks. The image is almost physiological: the heart gets so overlit it can no longer contain itself, and the excess spills into the world as “sunshine.” That choice matters coming from a novelist famous for shadows, secrets, and the social chill of Puritan New England. He’s not writing Hallmark; he’s staging a jailbreak from moral claustrophobia.

The line’s slyest move is its two-door entry into love: “newly born” or “aroused from a deathlike slumber.” Hawthorne knows people don’t simply fall in love; they also recover it, sometimes after years of repression, guilt, or emotional anesthesia. The “deathlike slumber” phrase is doing heavy lifting: it echoes the moral death that comes from internalized judgment, the way communities can train desire to go dormant. Love, in his telling, isn’t just romance. It’s revival.

“Must always” reads like insistence, even self-persuasion. Hawthorne is staking a claim against his own darker instincts: that tenderness has a reliably outward effect, that it changes not just the lover but the atmosphere around them. The subtext is social. If love overflows, it becomes visible; it refuses secrecy. In a Hawthorne world where hidden sin corrodes, the radical act is feeling something that can’t stay hidden - and letting it brighten the room without apology.