"Mark Twain" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dramatic point of view, an outworn passion. It is too obviously irrational and anti-social to pass muster in modern costume. The actual vendetta may possibly survive in some semi-barbarous regions, and Grangerfords and Shepherdsons (as in Mark Twain's immortal romance) may still be shooting each other at sight. But these things are relics of the past; they do not belong to the normal, typical life of our time. It is useless to say that human nature is the same in all ages. That is one of the facile axioms ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... England First Impressions of Literary New York Roundabout to Boston Literary Boston As I Knew It Oliver Wendell Holmes The White Mr. Longfellow Studies of Lowell Cambridge Neighbors A Belated Guest My Mark Twain ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... centre of their power and not as a province. Nevertheless, nearly every strand of our interwoven ancestry has at one time or other suffered as a subject race, and perhaps from that source we derive the quality that Mark Twain perceived when at the Jubilee Procession of our Empire he observed, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." Perhaps also for this reason we raise the Recessional prayer for a humble and contrite heart, lest we forget our ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... it for ever. Mr. Leacock's new book, 'Nonsense Novels,' is more humorous than 'Literary Lapses.' That is to say, it is the most humorous book we have had since Mr. Dooley swum into our ken. Its humour is so rich that it places Mr. Leacock beside Mark Twain." ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... crushed by this, but tried to defend myself by saying that I had only written it for one indulgent eye, and ended lamely by promising that the next time I wrote anything I would be more careful. "I will do as Mark Twain did—put the punctuations at the end, and one can ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... interest in the Turkish Village was "Far-a-way Moses"—the celebrated guide and counselor of Americans, visiting the shores of the Bosporus—who has been immortalized by Mark Twain. With a pleasant smile his popular face, he gave a cordial greeting to ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler
... Minter's 'Anne' on the screen is worthy of Mark Twain's definition of her as the 'dearest and most moving and delightful child since the immortal ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... capacious settle, we drank a lot of beer and were often fuddled, and occasionally quite drunk, and we all smoked reckless-looking pipes,—there was a transient fashion among us for corn cobs for which Mark Twain, I think, was responsible. Our little excesses with liquor were due far more to conscience than appetite, indicated chiefly a resolve to break away from restraints that we suspected were keeping us off the instructive knife-edges of life. Hatherleigh ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... blue edition; on the third from the bottom Don Quixote, in four volumes, covered with brown paper; a green Milton; the "Comedies of Aristophanes"; a leather book, partially burned, comparing the philosophy of Epicurus with the philosophy of Spinoza; and in a yellow binding Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn." On the second from the bottom was lighter literature: "The Iliad"; a "Life of Francis of Assisi"; Speke's "Discovery of the Sources of the Nile"; the "Pickwick Papers"; "Mr. Midshipman Easy"; The Verses of Theocritus, in a very old translation; Renan's "Life of Christ"; and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... You could just see the flames too, if you stooped low enough and opened the little stove door. But the wood burnt so quickly that it was most difficult to keep a big room warm. Nowadays you always find the porcelain stove that Mark Twain says looks like the family monument. In some of these coal is burnt, or a mixture of coal and peat. Some burn anthracite, and are considered economical. A Fuellofen of this kind is kept burning night ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... I was made happy by finding a copy of Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad in a store over in Nazareth on the Peruvian side of the Javary River. I took it with me to my hammock, hailing with joy the opportunity of receiving in the wilderness something that promised ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... When Mark Twain saw the crater, "vagrant white clouds came drifting along, high over the sea and valley; then they came in couples and groups; then in imposing squadrons; gradually joining their forces, they banked themselves solidly together a thousand feet under us ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... But we couldn't do much, because first we read "Tom Sawyer" along settin' on stumps and logs. We had to get the idea into our heads better; at least I did, because now we was about to carry out what Tom had done and wrote about—or what Mark Twain had wrote about for him. So we'd no sooner dig a few spadefuls than it would be gettin' dark, and ...
— Mitch Miller • Edgar Lee Masters
... Mark Twain suggests that the prophecy refers to the church, rather than to the city; but forgets to remind us that the Church of Christ is well represented and crowned with life in Smyrna. God's predictions regard the vital part of communities, the ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... seem exciting to Gaston, but it did sound honest, and it was in the picture. He much preferred Meredith, and Swinburne, and Dumas, and Hugo; but with her he did also like the whimsical Mark Twain. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... English patriotism. Voltaire's scandalous work, La Pucelle, and Schiller's noble Jungfrau von Orleans make an instructive contrast. She has been the subject of many dramas and works of poetry and fiction. Her latest prominent admirer is Mark Twain, whose historical romance Joan of Arc is one of the most carefully written, though not one of the most characteristic of ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... remember in my fingers the large hands of Bishop Brooks, brimful of tenderness and a strong man's joy. If you were deaf and blind, and could have held Mr. Jefferson's hand, you would have seen in it a face and heard a kind voice unlike any other you have known. Mark Twain's hand is full of whimsies and the drollest humours, and while you hold it the drollery changes to ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... generation fools and blackguards have made this claim; and honest and reasonable men, led by the strongest contemporary minds, have repudiated it and exposed its crude rascality. From Shakespear and Dr. Johnson to Ruskin and Mark Twain, the natural abhorrence of sane mankind for the vivisector's cruelty, and the contempt of able thinkers for his imbecile casuistry, have been expressed by the most popular spokesmen of humanity. If ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... evidently was given to my condition, for on the second morning I found clean linen with a neat suit of blue serge awaiting me in the bathroom, and when I had breakfasted, the black brought a parcel of books to me; I found amongst them, to my satisfaction, several light works by Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and Max Adeler, as well as more solid literary food. The books saved me from much of that foreboding which I should have known wanting them, and after the first fears had passed I spent the hours in reading ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... Hon. Chauncey M. Depew, Hon. Daniel Dougherty, Henry E. Howland, W. H. McElroy, U. S. Consul; G. W. Griffin, who was representing the United States at Sydney when we were there; Mayor Chapin, of Brooklyn; Mayor Cleveland, of Jersey City; Erastus Wyman, Samuel L. Clemens ("Mark Twain"), and the Rev. Joseph Twitchell, of Hartford, Conn.; while scattered about the hall at various tables were seated representatives of different college classes, members of the New York Stock Exchange, the president and prominent members ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... agonized attempts to utter the words, failing again and again, until Charles Stuart would snatch the book from him. Sometimes the sight of John struggling to utter in anguishing whispers the thing that was rendering him helpless was far funnier than Mark Twain himself, and Elizabeth and Charles Stuart would roll over on the grass in shrieks of laughter long before they heard what the ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... instance, one thinks of the rottenness-to-the-core of Dean Farrar's Eric, or the spiritus vulgaritatis fortissimus of Mark Twain's A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur—one feels a little ashamed of ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... bubbling up, or a river turn backward in its course. And what men and women he has had, first and last, at his table; it is impossible to exhaust the list or exaggerate its quality. Horace Greeley, Henry Ward Beecher, E. H. Chapin, Bayard Taylor, Mark Twain, and the Cary sisters, were a few among Americans; and Thackeray, Matthew Arnold, George Augustus Sala, and I know not how many others, from abroad. No catalogue of them, but only types can be given here. He was almost never without people who made no claim to distinction; and to them, ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... completely ignored so far as the European theatre of war is concerned,'—and here again,—'Egypt and South Africa will at once revolt and break away from the empire,' —really, General, your ideas of the British Colonies are superbly funny. Mark Twain wasn't ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... who was a great admirer of Mark Twain was visiting in Hannibal, Mo. He asked the darkey who was driving him about if he knew where Huckleberry Finn lived. "No sah, I never heard of the gemmen." Then he said "Then perhaps you knew Tom Sawyer?" "No, sah, I never met the gemmen." "But surely you have heard ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... agricultural resources of Syria and Palestine are very different. As instances of extremes:—Mark Twain tells us he saw the goats eating stones in Syria, and he assures us that he could not have been mistaken, for they had nothing else to eat; while Mr. Laurence Oliphant saw even in the Dead Sea "a vast source of wealth" for his English Company. We read in his "Land of Gilead" these words: "There ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... McKelway at a dinner given in honor of Samuel L. Clemens [Mark Twain] by the Lotos Club, New York City, November 2, 1900. The President of the Lotos, Frank R. Lawrence, introduced Dr. McKelway as the man whose wondrous use of adjectives has converted to his opinion many doubters throughout this city ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... owner of both in his day. He was a cautious and judicious purchaser of realty. The court records show that at some time or other he was the owner of the most desirable parts of Fentress county. He held title to the land upon which Jamestown, the county seat, now stands, which is the "Obedstown" of Mark Twain's "Gilded Age." He owned "Rock Castle," a tract of hardwood timber that is enclosed by mountains and can be reached by but one passageway, a place that became famous during the Civil War. He bought and sold much of the county's ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... the fireplace and filled every shelf and table in the room, were the very best—Dickens, Thackeray, Washington Irving, Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Addison, and of the later writers, Kipling, O. Henry, Anatole France, Mark Twain, Barrie. ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... Mark Twain's tears over the grave of Adam, a relative buried in a strange land, all will recall. On a basis as good perhaps, I walked through Downing Street with a certain sense of proprietorship, for did it not bear the name and had it not been the home ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... "Do you remember what Mark Twain said about people in olden times being born on the bridge, living on it all their lives, and finally dying on it, without having been in any other part of the world?" said Phil, looking about him ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... proceeds rather from what we have already called a "reciprocal interference of two series." I am speaking of the extravagant and comic reasonings in which we really meet with this confusion in its pure form, though it requires some looking into to pick it out. For instance, listen to Mark Twain's replies to the reporter who ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... Wendell Holmes Benjamin Franklin "Josh Billings" "Mark Twain" Charles Dudley Warner James T. Fields Henry ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... sounds almost cruel. In those days children were always regarded as if, to quote Mark Twain, "every one being born with an equal amount of original sin, the pressure on the square inch must needs be greater in a baby." Poor little original sinners, how very scurvily the world of books and picture-makers treated you less than a century ago! Life for you then was a perpetual reformatory, ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... Old South, the new literature was related directly to the life of the people. Men began to describe Southern scenery, not some fantastic world of dreamland; sentimentalism was superseded by a healthy realism. The writers fell in with contemporary tendencies and followed the lead of Bret Harte and Mark Twain, who had begun to write humorous local sketches and incidents. With them literature was not a diversion, but a business. They were willing to be known as men of letters who made their living by literature. They ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... sort of instinctive in all of them, but none attained the personality of "The Demon Lover," and there were several that Anthony considered downright cheap. These, Dick explained severely, were to widen his audience. Wasn't it true that men who had attained real permanence from Shakespeare to Mark Twain had appealed to the many as well as ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... side with considerable violence, and take his seat. The Indian was a refined gentleman, much his superior both by birth and education, and speaking English excellently. He was reading a volume of Mark Twain for his recreation in the train. Although a good deal disturbed by the rudeness which he had received, he did not lose his temper, but remonstrated ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... resignedly. "You can knock all you want now, but when I get to be rich and famous, like Mark Twain, for instance, you'll be sorry that you were so dumb that ...
— The Radio Boys at the Sending Station - Making Good in the Wireless Room • Allen Chapman
... Mark Twain autograph letter brought $43 yesterday at the auction by the Merwin-Clayton Company of the library and correspondence of the late Thomas Nast, cartoonist. The letter is nine pages note-paper, is dated Hartford, Nov. 12, 1877, ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... intervals like a saw, and she knew that this was a railway. But the map left a good deal to imagination, and she had not got any. She looked up the place in "Childe Harold," but Byron had not been there. Nor did Mark Twain visit it in the "Tramp Abroad." The resources of literature were exhausted: she must wait till Philip came home. And the thought of Philip made her try Philip's room, and there she found "Central Italy," by Baedeker, and opened it for the first time ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... Mark Twain's story, being told that his heroic death on the field of battle would have made but little difference to the nation at large, remarked, with deep philosophy; "It would have made a great deal of difference to me, sah." The ...
— The Autobiography of a Play - Papers on Play-Making, II • Bronson Howard
... never look on her face again. Yes, he would go at once, and forget the whole cursed stuff—said "cursed stuff" being the affectionate lines which continued to haunt him after the manner of the mind-destroying craze which Mark Twain inflicted on a later generation, "Punch, brothers, punch with care;" for as he walked down the street the words kept time to his feet, the train bells echoed them, and it was those very words that pealed ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... camp on the last day of 1900, with the "Compliments of the Season." Not of course, in order to cause any destruction, but simply as a New Year's greeting. We would have sent them close by like the Americans in Mark Twain's book: "Not right in it, you know, but close by or near it." Only the shells were wanting, for with the gun were 50 charged "hulzen" and ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... one to see how much he would carry off. He flew across a wide stream, and in a short time looked as bloody as a butcher from carrying large pieces; but his patience held out longer than mine. I think one would work as long as Mark Twain's California jay did trying to fill a miner's cabin with acorns through a knot-hole in the root. They are fond of the berries of the mountain ash, and, in fact, few things come amiss; I believe they do not possess a single ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... presented in this inimitable character which make the book so attractive to the English, who enjoy these more than the Americans,—the latter delighting rather in what is grotesque and extravagant, like the elaborate absurdities of "Mark Twain." But this humor is more than that of a shrewd and thrifty English farmer's wife; it belongs to human nature. We have seen such voluble sharp, sagacious, ironical, and worldly women among the farm-houses of New England, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... many; in this field we count not only Lowell, Neal, and Holmes, but the younger band, which includes Artemas Ward, Mark Twain, Nasby, Bret Harte, Warner, and Leland. In the department of essays and miscellaneous belles-lettres, the names of George William Curtis, Thoreau, Tuckerman, Higginson, Marsh, and many more, crowd upon the mind. Foremost among writers of ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle
... They, too, cast no shadow but their own. They attain their effects by bad spelling, and a simple transliteration reveals the poverty of their wit. There is but one author who represents with any clarity the spirit of his country, and that author is Mark Twain. Not Mark Twain the humourist, the favourite of the reporters, the facile contemner of things which are noble and of good report, but Mark Twain, the pilot of the Mississippi, the creator of Huck Finn ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... to dress. If the book wishes to tell us that Mary Godwin, child of sixteen, had known afflictions, the fact saunters forth in this nobby outfit: "Mary herself was not unlearned in the lore of pain."—MARK TWAIN. ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... supply of provisions, the streets present quite an animated appearance; but during the heat of the day the scene changes to one of squalor and indolence; respectable citizens are smoking nargilehs (Mark Twain's "hubble-bubble"), or sleeping somewhere out of sight; business is generally suspended, and in every shady nook and corner one sees a swarthy ragamuffin stretched out at full length, perfectly happy and contented if only ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... printer once heard a newspaperman say that this little incident furnished the suggestion to Mark Twain for his Jumping Frog of Calaveras, but, unfortunately, regarded the remark as of no more importance than much other gossip ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... time he was an appreciative student of the American humorists, and he was very fond of spicing his remarks with apt and amusing quotations from Hosea Biglow, Mark Twain, Artemus Ward, and other comic classics. Indeed, at one time, no speech of his would have been complete without some little sallies of this kind. Now, however, he rarely indulges in such pleasantries. Mr. Chamberlain's speeches in the House of Commons though never dull are never funny. ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... Adams never made any popular demonstrations to chronicle; but wherever Jackson went there went the other Jack, the crude first-fruits of what is now known through the world as "American humor." Jack Downing was Mark Twain and Hosea Biglow and Artemus Ward in one. The impetuous President enraged many and delighted many, but it is something to know that under him a serious people first found that ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... "you flatter my poor charms; but we cannot deceive ourselves; this is, as Mark Twain says, the 'gilded age,' and in going to the altar one of the two must ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... the character of Eugene Field is seen, genius—rare and quaint presents itself is childlike simplicity. That he was a poet of keen perception, of rare discrimination, all will admit. He was a humorist as delicate and fanciful as Artemus Ward, Mark Twain, Bill Nye, James Whitcomb Riley, Opie Read, or Bret Harte in their happiest moods. Within him ran a poetic vein, capable of being worked in any direction, and from which he could, at will, extract that which his imagination saw and felt most. That he ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... with a lavish hand, but few of his benefactions, comparatively, were known. The newspapers have made much of his throwing a hawser to Mark Twain and towing the Humorist off a financial sand-bar. Also, we have heard how he gave Helen Keller to the world; for without the help of H. H. Rogers that wonderful woman would still be like unto the eyeless fish in the Mammoth Cave. As it is, her soul radiates ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... out mystified. As Mark Twain's friend, Mr. Ballou, remarked about the coffee, Cappy Ricks was a little too ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... have a fine native memory, in each instance the finished product necessitates much labor. Should you forget a part of your speech or miss a few words, you are liable to be so confused that, like Mark Twain's guide in Rome, you will be compelled to repeat ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... of the Golden Era, a periodical we all subscribed for and were immensely proud of. It was unique in its way. Of late years I have found no literary journal to compare with it at its best. It introduced Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Prentice Mulford, Joaquin Miller, Ina Coolbrith, and many others, to their first circle of admirers. In the large mail-box at its threshold—a threshold I dared not cross for awe of it—I dropped my earliest efforts in verse, and then ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... modern York, too, and so much of it that you might almost miss the old if you didn't know. Lots of interesting people have stayed there: Mr. Howells, and Mark Twain, and your beloved Thomas Nelson Page among the rest, but beyond their zone is the zone of the tiny toy cottages, the crowded boarding-houses, the snub-nosed Lord motor cars rolling along the beach close to the rolling waves, and beginning to sink in the sand if they stop. Beyond again, woods ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... When Mark Twain was in Bombay, a few years ago, he met with an unusual experience for a mortal. He was a guest of the late Mr. Tata, a famous Parsee merchant, and received a great deal of attention. All the foreigners in the city knew him, and had read his books, and there are in Bombay hundreds of highly cultivated ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... needful endowment for a critic of American letters is the power to induce within himself "a profound murmur of ancestral voices, and to experience a mysterious inflowing of national experience, in meditating on the names of Mark Twain, Whitman, Thoreau, Lincoln, Emerson, Franklin, and Bradford." Compare "Is There Anything To Be Said for Literary Tradition," in The Bookman for October, 1920. Any candid consideration of Dr. Sherman's phraseology, here as elsewhere, cannot fail to suggest that ...
— Taboo - A Legend Retold from the Dirghic of Saevius Nicanor, with - Prolegomena, Notes, and a Preliminary Memoir • James Branch Cabell
... visible, formed a queer collection of old men addicted to rum. They all came out to admire Ladrone and to criticise my pack-saddle, and as they stood about spitting and giving wise instances, they reminded me of the Jurors in Mark Twain's "Puddin Head Wilson." ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... spaces, where the soil has been scraped off and the coral rock exposed and glazed with hard whitewash. Some of these are a quarter acre in size. They catch and carry the rainfall to reservoirs, for the wells are few and poor, and there are no natural springs and no brooks." (Mark Twain, "Some Rambling Notes of ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume V (of VI) • Various
... wealth, applause, success in Europe and at home, would all have been yours. Within thirty years so great a change has passed over the profession of letters in America; and it is impossible to estimate the rewards which would have fallen to Edgar Poe, had chance made him the contemporary of Mark Twain and of "Called Back." It may be that your criticisms helped to bring in the new era, and to lift letters out of the reach of quite unlettered scribblers. Though not a scholar, at least you had a respect for scholarship. You might still marvel over such words as "objectional" ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... fact that these sketches of travel led Warner incidentally to enter into an entirely new field of literary exertion. This was novel-writing. Something of this nature he had attempted in conjunction with Mark Twain in the composition of "The Gilded Age," which appeared in 1873. The result, however, was unsatisfactory to both the collaborators. Each had humor, but the humor of each was fundamentally different. But the magazine with which ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... fickle flood, with changing landmarks and shifting channel. In all the great volume of literature bearing on the story of the river, the difficulties of its conquest are nowhere so truly recounted as in Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, the humorous quality of which does not obscure, but rather enhances its value as a picturesque and truthful story of the old-time pilot's life. The pilot began his work in boyhood as a "cub" to a licensed pilot. His duties ranged from bringing refreshments ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... me. I was merely projected about a thousand yards as though from a dynamite-gun, and then the brute tried to chew me up. You see she's a Mexican—what Mark Twain would call a 'genuine Mexican plug'—and doesn't seem to sabe United States; for when I began to reason with her she simply went wild. I left her tearing through the camp like a steam-cyclone, and if we find anything at all to show where it was located, ...
— "Forward, March" - A Tale of the Spanish-American War • Kirk Munroe
... Dudley Warner, once near neighbor to Mark Twain, that there is no culture west of Buffalo, was indelicate if not unkind; and residents of Omaha aver that it is open to argument. But the fact stands beyond cavil that what art we possess is traceable ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... and loved in every mood. Pickwick like Falstaff was to him a source of perennial delight. He loved and honoured Dickens for his rich and tender humanity, the passion of pity that suffused his soul, the lively play of his comic fancy. Endowed with a keen sense of humour, he read Mark Twain and W. W. Jacobs with gusto. As a relaxation from historical studies he would sometimes devour a bluggy story, and as he read would shout with laughter at its grotesque out-topping of probabilities. He tried his own ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... yet, but with an eye to the future I have persuaded him to give up Tolstoi and read Mark Twain, who is not only equally humorous, but much more sensible than the Russian writer. Jack must not be allowed to give away his estates to the peasants as his silly sister has done. I may need ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... of Adam, according to Mark Twain, in the Garden of Eden. Eve worked, Adam superintended. I also superintend. I find out where the stories are, and advise, and, in short, superintend. I do not write the stories out of my own head. The reputation of having written all the fairy books (an European ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... my interest turned to what academics might call 'the intellectual history of radical agriculture.' I reread the founders of the organic gardening and farming movement, only to discover that they, like Mark Twain's father, had become far more intelligent since l last read them fifteen years back. l began to understand that one reason so many organic gardeners misunderstood Albert Howard was that he wrote in English, not American. l also noticed that there were other related ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... and of the approaching spiritual. Even Dukas, and perhaps other Gauls, in their critical heart of hearts, may admit that "wit" in music, is as impossible as "wit" at a funeral. The wit is evidence of its lack. Mark Twain could be humorous at the death of his dearest friend, but in such a way as to put a blessing into the heart of the bereaved. Humor in music has the same possibilities. But its quantity has a serious effect on its quality, "inverse ratio" is a good ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... me an apple from Beaupre, Evangeline's farm, the pips whereof I sent to Albury for planting. Longfellow was much interested to hear that my collateral ancestor had married Martha, the heiress of "the Vineyard" in Rhode Island. Mr. Fields, on this festive occasion, recited some of Mark Twain's humour, and I had to give sundry of my American ballads, and the host himself his exquisite "Psalm of Life;" my "Venus," in reply to his "Mars," having appeared, and been praised by him, some years before. And this meagre record is all I care, or have space, to ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Stillwell Edwards, George W. Cable, Thomas Nelson Page, James Lane Allen, and Mark Twain are Southern men in Mr. Griffith's class. I recommend their works to him as a better basis ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... in American humor is that of the grotesque. It is characteristic in Mark Twain's best work, and it is characteristic of most of those others who have won fame as purveyors of laughter. The American tourist brags ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... this one of the public carriages happened to be within sight, and she proposed that they take it and go immediately to that sacred spot. When they arrived there her historic imagination knew no bounds; her soliloquy partook of the sentiment—in kind only, not in degree—which inspired Mark Twain when he wept over the grave of Adam. In the mean while, Mr. Gordon had gone to the Wannacomet Waterworks, which supplied the town with pure water from the old Washing-pond. He there noted in his note-book that this important movement in the town's welfare was another reason why investment ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 3 • Various
... as was predicted by all the pilots, while they hunched their shoulders above their ears, exclaiming, "No practico, no possebla!" This was my second trip down the Parana, it is true, and I had been on other rivers as wonderful as this one, and had, moreover, read Mark Twain's "Life on the Mississippi," which gives no end of information on river currents, wind-reefs, sand-reefs, alligator-water, and all that is useful to know about rivers, so that I was confident of my ability; all that had been ...
— Voyage of the Liberdade • Captain Joshua Slocum
... his guests with stories, not in the braggart vein of Dugald Dalgetty, but so embellished with palpably extravagant lies as to crack with a humour that was all their own. The manner has been appropriated by Artemus Ward and Mark Twain, but it was invented by Munchausen. Now the stories mainly relate to sporting adventures, and it has been asserted by one contemporary of the baron that Munchausen contracted the habit of drawing such a long-bow as a measure of self-defence against his invaluable ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... Mark Twain once listened to the complaints of an old riverboat pilot who was having trouble making the switch from sail to steam. The old pilot wanted no part of the newfangled steam contraptions. "Maybe so," replied Twain, "but when ...
— The Practical Values of Space Exploration • Committee on Science and Astronautics
... slap-dash language of the American frontier, with its picturesque perversions and its droll exaggeration. The inspired person who chose to call a coffin an "eternity box" and whisky "blue ruin" was too innocent to sneer. The slang of Mark Twain's Mr. Scott when he goes to make arrangements for the funeral of the lamented Buck Fanshawe is excruciatingly funny and totally inoffensive. Then the story of Jim Baker and the jays in "A Tramp Abroad" ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... are born gamblers, and resemble Jim Smiley, of Mark Twain's "Jumping Frog." Jim was "always betting on anything that turned up, if he could get anybody to bet on the other side; and if he couldn't he'd change sides. Any way that suited the other man would suit him—any way just so's he got a bet, ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... sent in an old typewritten sheet, faded by age, containing the following letter over the signature of Mark Twain: ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... fortune in little cheap rooms on Telegraph Hill. Here have lived many whose names are now known to fame, and to name them would be almost like a directory of world renowned artists and writers. Here is still the memory of Bret Harte and Mark Twain. Here is where Keith had his early studio. Cadenasso, Martinez, and many others know ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords
... depict negro character, have had a world-wide currency. Among other novelists were Paulding and Sedgwick, and more recently, Howells, James, Bret Harte, Cable, and Aldrich. The most distinguished humorist has been S. M. Clemens (Mark Twain). ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... like, evidently having no very exalted opinion of the literary tastes of his family; and he provided Esther with a yellow-back—on which was depicted a lady in a green dress fainting in the arms of a gentleman attired in purple, and Meg with Mark Twain's "Jumping Frog", because he had noticed a certain air of ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... devil we were doing in that galley tickled us both. It was my sole experience of Oscar's wonderful gift as a raconteur. I remember particularly an amazingly elaborate story which you have no doubt heard from him: an example of the cumulation of a single effect, as in Mark Twain's story of the man who was persuaded to put lightning conductor after lightning conductor at every possible point on his roof until a thunderstorm came and all the lightning in the heavens went for his ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... trying his pen in The Golden Era of San Francisco, where he was working as a compositor; and when The Californian, edited by Charles Henry Webb, was started in 1864 as a literary newspaper, he was one of a group of brilliant young fellows—Mark Twain, Charles Warren Stoddard, Webb himself, and Prentice Mulford—who gave at once a new interest in California beside what mining and agriculture caused. Here in an early number appeared "The Ballad of the Emeu," and he contributed many poems, grave and gay, as well as prose in a great ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... probable that many novelists of distinction have altogether escaped my notice; and I have made no attempt to include in my list the writers of short magazine stories, many of them artists of high accomplishment. One omission, however, I must at once repair. "Mark Twain's" contributions to the work of self-realisation have been in the main retrospective, but nevertheless of the first importance. He is the "sacred poet" of the Mississippi. If any work of incontestable genius, and plainly predestined to immortality, has been issued ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... seem to see the big captain—"Foxy grandpa"—beating the bass drum like that extraordinary man that Mark Twain tells about, "who hadn't a tooth in his whole head." I can remember how Don Julian, the crusty Spaniard, animated with the spirit of old Capulet, stood on the chair and shouted, "Viva los Americanos!"—and ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... Mark Twain once remarked that 'everybody talks about the weather and nobody does anything about it'. And many people think that we might as well hope to direct the course of the winds as to order the evolution of our speech. Some words have ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 5 - The Englishing of French Words; The Dialectal Words in Blunden's Poems • Society for Pure English
... deep as a well; bathycolpian[obs3]; benthal[obs3], benthopelagic[obs3]; downreaching[obs3], yawning. knee deep, ankle deep. Adv. beyond one's depth, out of one's depth; over head and ears; mark twine, mark twain. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... his collar—considers it fitting to treat the Indian mass with a cold, indifferent tone of superiority. Yet in the outer circle the unprejudiced observer found more pleasing than within. One was reminded of Mark Twain's suggestion that complexions of some color wear best in tropical lands. In this, above all, the women of the rebozo were vastly superior to those who stepped from their carriages at about the beginning of the third number and took ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... with the passing hectic flush of its time. The current-topic variety is especially subject to very early frosts, as is also the dialectic species. Mark Twain's humor is not to be classed with the fragile plants; it has a serious root striking deep down into rich earth, and I think it ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... good cheerful books of the best and brightest sides of human nature—Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain, and Bret Harte, and those men. And I'd have all Australian pictures—showing the brightest and best side of Australian life. And I'd have all Australian songs. I wouldn't have 'Swannie Ribber,' or 'Home, Sweet Home,' or 'Annie Laurie,' or any of those old ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... sure that I agree that that's Hardy's philosophy. It's fair enough to say that Hardy's stories, and still more his poems, paint chiefly the gloomy and hopeless situations in life, just as Mark Twain and Aristophanes painted the comic ones. But Mark Twain was very far from thinking the world was a joke, and I doubt whether Hardy regards it at ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... secondarily a short story writer. As a humorist he is of the first rank; as a writer of short stories his place is hardly so high. His humor is not mere funniness and diversion; he is a humorist in the fundamental and large sense, as are Cervantes, Rabelais, and Mark Twain. ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... wandering in among our tents, like the party who goes about seeking what he may devour, and on getting hold of some such choice morsel as a sock, shirt, or blanket, Mrs. Bossie would chew and chew, "gradually," to quote Mark Twain, "taking it in, all the while opening and closing her eyes in a kind of religious ecstasy, as if she had never tasted anything quite as good as an overcoat before in her life." It is no use arguing about tastes, not even with a cow. In spite ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... attention to the deficiencies of German culture. There were in Germany many writers who appealed strongly to their fellow-countrymen, but except only the solitary Heine no German writer attained to the international fame achieved by Cooper and by Poe, by Walt Whitman and by Mark Twain. And it was during these threescore years of literary aridity in Germany that there was a superb literary fecundity in Great Britain and in France, and that each of these countries produced at least a score of authors whose names are known throughout the world. Even sparsely settled ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... known far beyond our own borders, and he remains one of the best known. In the class with him belong James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking (or Natty Bumppo), Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom, Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus, and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. He has been called un-American, and so he is, and so Irving plainly intended him to be. If one insists on finding a bit of distinctive Americanism somewhere in the story, he will find it not in Rip but in the number and rapidity of the ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... speller, writer, reference-book maker, and language itemizer. W. was the man to whom Mark Twain paid a glowing tribute by saying he was a great writer, but ...
— Who Was Who: 5000 B. C. to Date - Biographical Dictionary of the Famous and Those Who Wanted to Be • Anonymous
... pretend to say when the "professional Southerner," as we know him in New York, began to operate, nor shall I attempt to place the literary blame for his existence—as Mark Twain attempted to place upon Sir Walter Scott the blame for southern "chivalry," and almost for the Civil War itself. Let me merely say, then, that I should not be surprised to learn that "Colonel Carter of Cartersville"—that ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... than suspected of having been a freebooter, and even a murderer. This did not prevent his station from being one of the best on the road, his horses always good, his meals easily bolted. Of him and of his band you may read the history in Mark Twain's Roughing It. After the railroad was finished the Indians descended upon these lonely ranches in the valley of the Platte, now left out in the cold: they attacked Slade's house one morning in force, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various |
