but there is a fatality,
a feeling
so irresistible and inevitable
that it has the force of doom,
which almost invariably
compels human beings to linger and haunt,
ghost-like,
the spot where some great and marked event
has given the color to their lifetime:
and still the more irresistibly,
the darker the tinfe that saddens it.
~The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne