“ Men and women, and children, too, are such strange creatures, that one never can be certain that he really knows them ”
 Nathaniel Hawthorne, House of the Seven Gables (1851). copy citation

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Author Nathaniel Hawthorne
Source House of the Seven Gables
Topic women
Date 1851
Language English
Reference
Note
Weblink http://www.gutenberg.org/files/77/77-h/77-h.htm

Context

“answered Holgrave with a smile. "Only this is such an odd and incomprehensible world! The more I look at it, the more it puzzles me, and I begin to suspect that a man's bewilderment is the measure of his wisdom. Men and women, and children, too, are such strange creatures, that one never can be certain that he really knows them; nor ever guess what they have been from what he sees them to be now. Judge Pyncheon! Clifford! What a complex riddle—a complexity of complexities—do they present! It requires intuitive sympathy, like a young girl's, to solve it.” source