The moment when a man's head drops off is seldom or never, I am inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of his life. - Nathaniel Hawthorne

Life is made up of marble and mud.

The horrible ugliness of this exposure of a sick and guilty heart to the very eye that would gloat over it!

Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have seen in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien, and with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image of Divine Maternity, which so many illustrious painters have vied with one another to represent; something which should remind him, indeed, but only by contrast, of that sacred image of sinless motherhood, whose infant was to redeem the world. Here, there was the taint of of deepest sin in the most sacred of quality of human life, working such effect, that the world was only the darker for this woman's beauty, and the more lost for the infant that she had borne.