"Mark Twain" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... On our pilgrimage up this weary flight of stairs the guide drew our attention to a gloomy little dungeon, cut out of the thickness of the wall, in which there is but little light, and wherein the musty smell of ages is plainly discernible. "This," whispered Mr. Greville in my ear, "reminds me of Mark Twain's 'Innocents Abroad.'" After a glance at the record chamber, which was crammed with documents, we passed, with a sense of relief, into the bright sunny air and the large courtyard, round which are built the handsome lofty stables in which the Castle horses—of which there are an immense number—are ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... Herb 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 you ...
— The Radio Boys at the Sending Station - Making Good in the Wireless Room • Allen Chapman
... ever a 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 ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... a city hospital or a country poorhouse represented the lower stage of development from which the strong and healthy men and women in the surrounding country had been evolved. Our evolutionists are in very much the same plight with Mark Twain and his friend, who, having slept all day, rushed from the hotel in scanty clothing, climbed the observatory and to the amusement of the guests loudly admired what they took to be the famous Rigi sunrise, while in fact they were ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... called Hotel Billfinger, which I'd like to try, because Mark Twain's guide in 'Innocents Abroad' was ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... of white in his veins—or even in the hue of 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 to parading, the two sexes in pairs marching ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... 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 ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... Mark Twain said at one point that we should be thankful for the indolent, since but for them the rest of us could not get ahead. That's on the target, and it emphasizes that how fast and far each of us travels is largely a matter ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... author has been dead for some time, it becomes increasingly difficult for his publishers to get out a new book by him each year. Without recourse to the ouija board, Harper & Brothers manage to do very well by Mark Twain, considering that all they have to work with are the books that he wrote when he was alive. Each year we get something from the pen of the famous humorist, even though the ink has faded slightly. An introduction by Albert Bigelow ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... Clemens," Adrian answered. "An improvident cuss but good company. He writes for the Carson Appeal under the name of Mark Twain." ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... 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, ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... first hand, any possible information in regard to reminiscences of Bret Harte, Mark Twain and others of the little coterie of writers, who in the early fifties visited the mining camps of California and through stories that have become classics, played a prominent part in making "California" a synonym for romance, ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... Edward Noyes Westcott his true place in American letters—placing him as a humorist next to Mark Twain, as a master of dialect above Lowell, as a descriptive writer equal to Bret Harte, and, on the whole, as a novelist on a par with the best of those who live and have their being in the heart of hearts of American readers. If the author is dead—lamentable fact—his ...
— Snow on the Headlight - A Story of the Great Burlington Strike • Cy Warman
... women of this country and a lot of other countries have found out what even temporary absence means. A house without a man in it is as nice and tidy and peaceful and attractive and cheerful as a grave in a cemetery. It is as pleasant as Mark Twain's celebrated combination of rheumatism and St. Vitus dance, and as empty as a penny-in-the-slot chocolate ...
— 'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!' • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... 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 ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... are notoriously unfaithful to their stage favourites. In "The Innocents Abroad" Mark Twain tells us of the bad manners of an Italian audience. The singer he mentions is Erminia Frezzolini, born at Orvieto in 1818. She sang both in England and America. Chorley said of her: "She was an elegant, tall woman, born with a lovely voice, and bred with great vocal ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... Chairman, 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 of the New York Athletic Club, and ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... constantly more prominent, and then the analysis of the working of the human mind, psychologic analysis, held the interest of some foremost writers. Stories of these various kinds came to the front about the third quarter of the last century. "Mark Twain" (Samuel Langhorne Clemens), Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and Frank R. Stockton preeminently and admirably present the humor so peculiarly an American trait. Local color had its exponents in George W. Cable, who presented Louisiana; "Charles Egbert Craddock" (Miss ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... International Exhibition. No, we must take our Exhibitions more humbly: they are amusing and instructive; they earn dividends or lose capital; they stimulate orders for the goods on view, and they end in a shower of medals. In France, according to Mark Twain, few men escape the Legion of Honor. Is there any artificial product that has escaped a medal at some Exhibition or the other? I cannot recall eating or drinking anything undecorated. They grow on every ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... As it happens my wife and I are hoping to be blessed again soon, with our eighth. Owing to my love and devotion for the fine arts we have named all the earlier children for noted authors or writers Rudyard Kipling, W.J. Bryan, Mark Twain, Debs, Irvin Cobb, Walt Mason and Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Now Mr. Urwick I thought that I would name the next one after you, seeing you have done so much for literature Robert if a boy or Roberta if a girl with Urwick for a middle name thus making you ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... Clair 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
... Mark Twain himself has never rivaled.... If there ever was an ideal character in fiction it is this ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... in a little mild blasphemy; hardly blasphemy—imaginary details, say, about hell, in the manner of Mark Twain. "Aw, my dear soul!" she exclaims. "How yu du go on! Aw, my dear soul! Yu'm going to hell, ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... carriage shove an Indian to one 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 in emphatic but ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... 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 required was the stirring-up that I got from the impertinent pilot, or ...
— Voyage of the Liberdade • Captain Joshua Slocum
... in the afternoon when school was over. 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 we'd have ...
— Mitch Miller • Edgar Lee Masters
... 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 ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... a career from which much was to be expected, a man, possessed of rare and original qualities of head and heart, sank out of the sphere in which at that time he was the most prominent figure. There was then no Mark Twain or Bret Harte. His rivals were such humorists as Orpheus C. Kerr, Nasby, Asa Hartz, The Fat Contributor, John Happy, Mrs. Partington, Bill Arp and the like, who are now ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... jest would have peace, ef he had to lick every darned galoot in the valley to git it."—Mark Twain, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... telling these stories may seem at first glance to be simple: short sentences, a sparse vocabulary, uncomplicated syntax. In actuality, Anderson developed an artful style in which, following Mark Twain and preceding Ernest Hemingway, he tried to use American speech as the base of a tensed rhythmic prose that has an economy and a shapeliness seldom found in ordinary speech or even oral narration. What Anderson employs here is a stylized version of ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... it yourself, old man! It's all you can do. But what a frightful list of blunders. If you had to tell a lie why didn't you take Mark Twain's advice and tell a good one? The name, for instance—why on earth did you choose 'Mary?' Even 'Marion' would have been safer. Don't you know you can't turn a corner in Bainbridge or anywhere else ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... 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 of this drawback, it ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... 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 and totally shut out land and ocean; ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... not long ago a Swedish critic (Gunnar Castren in Samtiden, Christiania, June, 1912) wrote of Strindberg's literary beginnings that "he had learned much from Swedish literature, but probably more from Mark Twain ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... to read, books that crammed the small bookcase near 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
... skimmings placed him under the trained politicians. It was here, too, that his stereotyped prologue to his digressions—"That reminds me"—became popular, and even reached England, where a publisher so entitled a joke-book. Lincoln displaced "Sam Slick," and opened the way to Artemus Ward and Mark Twain. The longing for elevation was fanned by the association with the notables—Buchanan, to be his predecessor as President; Andrew Johnson, to be his vice and successor; Jefferson Davis and Alex. H. Stephens, President and Vice-President of the C. S. A.; Adams, Winthrop, Sumner, ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... with bushy, red eyebrows. And he was totally bald, except for the upper part of his neck, which was fiery with red hair. He had a large knowledge of the Rabelaisan in literature ... had in his possession several rather wild effusions of Mark Twain in the original copy, and a whole MSS. volume of Field's smutty ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... 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 ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... a successful argument with Fritz, to find your kind good wishes. It's rather a lark out here, though a lark which may turn against you any time. I laugh a good deal more than I mope. Anything really horrible has a ludicrous side—it's like Mark Twain's humour—a gross exaggeration. The maddest thing of all to me is that a person so willing to be amiable as I am should be out here killing people for principle's sake. There's no rhyme or reason—it can't be argued. Dimly one thinks he sees what is right and leaves ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... mystified. As Mark Twain's friend, Mr. Ballou, remarked about the coffee, Cappy Ricks was a little too ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... Vaura, smiling; "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 have the ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... 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
... 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
... I 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
... darky, in 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 radical change made in the story I have just ...
— The Autobiography of a Play - Papers on Play-Making, II • Bronson Howard
... though they needed help, were too modest or proud to ask for it. The speaker told of the suffering and bravery he found. Then he pointed out that the best gifts to charity are not the advertised bounties of the wealthy but the small donations of the less fortunate. His appeals worked Mark Twain up to great enthusiasm and generosity. He was ready to give all he had with him—four hundred dollars—and borrow more. The entire congregation wanted to offer all it had. But the missionary kept on talking. The audience began to notice ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... been that 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 ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... Past it there wandered a thin black line, notched at 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 ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... glimpse of the national character. 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 and Tom Sawyer. He is national as Fielding is ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... souper de pate de foie gras et de Champagne, il lui fit un regard d'encouragement: "Voila qui est bien, mon ami: toutes les choses agreables de la vie sont malsaines, ou couteuses, ou illicites." C'est un peu la philosophie du Pudd'n-head Wilson de Mark Twain, qui declare que, pour bien faire dans la vie, il faut se priver de tout ce que l'on aime, et faire tout ce que ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... at a tangent when he wrote about "Ah Sin, The Chinaman," a nonsense poem that gave "Bill Nye" his pseudonym. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote "The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay." Rudyard Kipling is often "caught with the goods on him" and Mark Twain wrote an "Ode to Stephen ...
— Poems for Pale People - A Volume of Verse • Edwin C. Ranck
... ESPECIALLY IN THE LEGAL PROFESSION . . . " have been Baconians, or, at least, opposed to Will Shakspere's authorship. To these names of scholars I must add that of my late friend, Samuel Clemens, D.Litt. of Oxford; better known to many as Mark Twain. Dr. Clemens was, indeed, no mean literary critic; witness his epoch-making study of Prof. Dowden's Life of Shelley, while his researches into the biography of Jeanne d'Arc were ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... poet, John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887) of Vermont, attempted something similar in literary verse after the style of Tom Hood. The heir to this tradition of farce, drollery and joke was Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), known as "Mark Twain," born in Missouri, who raised it to an extraordinary height of success and won world-wide reputation as a great and original humorist. His works, however, include a broader compass of fiction, greater humanity and reality, and ally him to the masters of humorous creation. Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908) ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Lady-with-the-Bust, "I don't know what men mean by our not having a sense of humour. I'm sure I have. I know I went last week to a vaudeville, and I just laughed all through. Of course I can't read Mark Twain, or anything like that, but then I don't call that funny, do you?" she ...
— Further Foolishness • Stephen Leacock
... plot. Indeed, these stories are the freest of all in their disregard for conventions; with them it is "anything to raise a laugh," and the end is supposed to justify the means. In general they are of transient interest and crude workmanship, little fitted to be called classics; but Mark Twain, at least, has shown us that humor ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... Century, Mark Twain pointed out that a steamboat pilot who navigated a ship up and down the Mississippi had to be able to identify every landmark and every changing sandbar along the river before he would be allowed to take charge ...
— Thin Edge • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Mr. Clemens (Mark Twain), who happened to be in Vienna during these uproarious sittings of Parliament, and witnessed one of them, declared that the nearest approach to such a riot in his experience was the lynching of a man out West for stealing a horse—but even that was a mild scene compared to the proceedings ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 55, November 25, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... genuine. It has not the sylvan, terraced, Cheltenham-cum-Bath appearance of its neighbour Monaghan, though it somewhat resembles Bath in its general outline. The ruins want tidying up, and no doubt they will be looked after when the demand is greater. Ruins are a drug in Ireland, and as Mark Twain would say—most of them are dreadfully out of repair. The Irish have no notion of making them attractive, of exploiting them, of turning an honest penny by their exhibition. The inhabitants of any given neighbourhood can never give ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... or a sentimental motive. In every 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 medical profession were to outdo the Anti-Vivisection Societies ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... paradise of a fool, and he sneaked up the steps, muttering to himself, "What shadows we are—(hic)—what shadows we pursue." Then I saw him again in the morning, reaping temptation's bitter reward in the agonies of his drunk-sick; and like Mark Twain's boat ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... essence, yet at least in form and expression, from any European humor, that it may be regarded as a unique addition to the comic literature of the world. It has been accepted as such in England, where Artemus Ward and Mark Twain are familiar to multitudes who have never read the One Hoss-Shay or The Courtin'. And though it would be ridiculous to maintain that either of these writers takes rank with Lowell and Holmes, or to ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... evidently tinged Etonian style. "What in the name of purple thunder," and "in the name of spotted Moses," and so forth, are Americanisms, and the tone of these two smart Etonian writers has a certain Yankee ring in it. Why not leave this sort of thing to MARK TWAIN, BRET HARTE & CO., who are past masters of their own native slang? Seven Summers will interest and ...
— Punch, Vol. 99., July 26, 1890. • Various
... I told him about a very interesting journey there; the lecture and supper afterwards, with Mark Twain as the presiding genius, concerning all of which he asked questions, wanting more particulars, and the whole story seemed to interest him. What seemed to specially please him was the incident when I arrived at the hotel, after the supper given me at the close of my lecture. It was about three ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... heartier, for hearty the relations between Daudet and his Anglo-Saxon readers certainly were. Whether it was that some of us saw in him that hitherto unguessed-at phenomenon, a French Dickens—not an imitator, indeed, but a kindred spirit—or that others found in him a refined, a volatilized "Mark Twain," with a flavour of Cervantes, or that still others welcomed him as a writer of naturalistic fiction that did not revolt, or finally that most of us enjoyed him because whatever he wrote was as steeped in the radiance of his own exquisitely charming personality as a picture of Corot's is ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... 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 a word from "God's Own ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... bad poetry and a much less quantity of excellent verse has been written about flowers, much of which follows to the letter Mark Twain's injunction about Truth. It must be admitted that the relations existing between the honeysuckle and the bee are basely practical and wholly selfish. A butterfly's admiration of a flower is no ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... paper interviews with centenarians, who tell us how to prolong our lives by having sufficient sleep, by eating moderately, by refraining from worry. But, as a writer in a southern journal expressed it, Why do these aged curiosities never tell us what use they have made of this prolonged existence? Mark Twain said cheerfully, "Methuselah lived nine hundred and sixty-nine years; but what of that? There was nothing doing." No drama on the stage is a success unless it has what we call a supreme moment; and the drama of our individual lives can not be really interesting or important unless it has some ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... have gathered from my cousin Robert! He also tells me they take wool out of his drawing-room cushions to line their nest. For further information of this kind the reader may care to refer to the writings of Mark Twain; he writes a great deal about this squirrel—says it is the same as the "chip munk" in his "erroneous, hazy, first impressions ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... A few immigrants who have acquired the habit of reading fiction prefer to read stories and poems of a more realistic character, like those of Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Ernest Poole, Mark Twain, Arnold Bennett, Longfellow. The traveling libraries need not be voluminous so much as of good quality. Aside from being practically useful, they should try to help the rural immigrant settlers to improve their standards of living and to broaden ...
— A Stake in the Land • Peter Alexander Speek
... "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 ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... mainly collected in New York, where the great publishing houses are located, and are a fine representative class of men and women, of whom I have met a number, such as Howells, the author and editor, and Mark Twain, the latter the most brilliant litterateur in the United States. This will be discovered when he dies and is safe beyond receiving all possible benefits from such recognition. Many men in America ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... Mark Twain, the celebrated humorist, was so taken with the quaint charm of L.M. Montgomery's tremendously popular novel that upon reading it for the first time he said: "In 'Anne of Green Gables' you will find the dearest and most moving and delightful girl ...
— Why the Chimes Rang: A Play in One Act • Elizabeth Apthorp McFadden
... Addresses; James (afterwards Sir Henry James).' Browning also 'was constantly at the house,' and read there his "Red Cotton Nightcap Country"—'at his own request.' Lord Houghton began in these days an intimacy which lasted till his death. Of Americans, there were Leland ("Hans Breitmann") and Mark Twain, and with these are named a number of foreign guests: Emile de Laveleye, the economist; Ricciotti Garibaldi; Moret, ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... was a great wit. (For Johnson, substitute, if you wish, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, Samuel Butler, Alexander Pope, Charles Lamb, Sidney Smith, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, or Mark Twain.) ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... 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 these ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords
... MARK TWAIN. A humorous writer of the nineteenth century. As yet, I have not had the honor of his acquaintance, but when I do meet him I shall say something jocose. I know I shall. I have it. My plan will be to inveigle him into going over a ferry to "see a man." As we pass up the slip on the other ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... 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 house and wiped ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... as these that they keep a Riddle Department at headquarters. They call it the Executive Department, but no matter—as Mark Twain would say. It is there to supply the answers to the conundrums that are always cropping up in ...
— Scotland Yard - The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police • George Dilnot
... "Pathfinder" Fremont; described in the early days of California history and literature by John Le Conte, Mark Twain, Thomas Starr King, Ben C. Truman, and later by John Vance Cheney and others; for countless centuries the fishing haunt of the peaceable Nevada Washoes, who first called it Tahoe—High or Clear Water—and of the California Monos; the home of many of their interesting ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... us, however, who are not true painters and to whom the most exquisite of color schemes are but dull results. Many of us walk around our galleries passing the best pictures in silence; others ridicule what they cannot understand. Even our own beloved Mark Twain, whose heart was always open to the best and warmest of human impressions, and who expressed them in every line of his pen, when led up to one of Turner's masterpieces, "The Slave Ship," a glory of red, yellow, and blue running riot over a sunset sky, the whole reflected in a troubled sea, remarked ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... 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" ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... The Slave Power, ch. v., and especially p. 374 foll. A living picture of the mean white may be found in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, drawn from his own early ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... Prosecution of Felons, and this speech (in which praise of red wine was rendered innocuous by praise of books—his fine library was notorious) had classed him as a wit with the American consul, whose post-prandial manner was modelled on Mark Twain's. He was thirty-five years of age, tall and stoutish, with a chubby boyish face that the razor left ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... such consideration. Consequently, for your gentle forbearance, you shall be accorded a unique privilege—that of meeting a dead soldier. I am Miguel Jose Farrel, better known as 'Don Mike,' of the Rancho Palomar, and I own Panchito. To quote the language of Mark Twain, 'the report of my death has been grossly exaggerated,' as is the case of several thousand other soldiers in this man's army." He chuckled as he saw a look of amazement replace the sweet smile. "And you are Miss—" ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... pleasant that is indescribable. It is easier felt than described, and I have no doubt is felt by many old-timers in this city to-day. Ask them to describe these feelings and they would be nonplussed. "Mark Twain" was written to by the pioneers of California inviting him to come and speak of the early days of San Francisco, when he was himself a pioneer of the Pacific. What his reply was I now forget, but it was something to this effect: "Do you wish to see an old man overcome and weep ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett
... it Mark Twain who said that the first half-hour you were awfully afraid you would die, and the next you were awfully afraid ...
— The Sunbridge Girls at Six Star Ranch • Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter
... by Irvin S. Cobb (George H. Doran Company). I have frequently had occasion to point out in the past that Mr. Cobb's work, in depth of conception and breadth of execution, makes him the legitimate successor of Mark Twain as a painter of the ampler life of the American South and Middle West. In his new collection of nine stories, there are at least three which I confidently believe are destined to last as long as the best stories of Hawthorne and Poe. The most noteworthy of these is "Boys Will Be Boys," ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Among the number were Harriet Martineau, Captain Marryat, Charlotte M. Yonge, Thomas Hughes, and others. As we pass toward the end of that century and the beginning of the twentieth, the great names associated with juvenile classics are very noticeable, and with Miss Alcott, Mrs. Ewing, "Mark Twain," Stevenson, Kipling, Masefield, and a kindred host, childhood has come ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... and swanlike; the water of the same turquoise blue, covered with a light pearly froth, and so clear that we see the large sponges at the bottom. Every minute they heave the lead. "By the mark three." "By the mark three, less a quarter." "By the mark twain and a half," (fifteen feet, the vessel drawing thirteen,) two feet between us and the bottom. The sailor sings it out like the first line of a hymn in short metre, doled out by the parish clerk. I wish Madame A—— were singing it instead of he. "By the mark three, ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... Francisco 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 current among printers ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... in its effort to engulf this brilliant artist. After a long struggle he yielded to her, but for a time he was a recluse, and his melancholy gradually wore out his health; until at length he was given up for a dying man, and obituary eulogies actually were published. But as Mark Twain wrote of himself: "The reports of his ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... the broken heart of Hester Prynne, that dream daughter of genius who never actually lived or died, but who was and is and ever will be. Her grave can be easily pointed out, but where is that of Alexander, of Themistocles, of Aristotle, even of the first figure of history—Adam? Mark Twain found it for a joke. Dr. Hale was finally forced to write a preface to "The Man Without a Country" to declare that his hero was pure fiction and that the pathetic punishment so marvelously described was not only imaginary, but legally ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... humorist with the pseudonym of "Mark Twain," born at Florida, Missouri, U.S.; began his literary career as a newspaper reporter and a lecturer; his first book "The Jumping Frog"; visited Europe, described in the "Innocents Abroad"; married a lady of fortune; wrote largely in his peculiar humorous ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... spoke last evening to the largest audience that ever greeted a lecturer in Marshall, and we have had Mrs. Stanton, Theodore Tilton, Mark Twain and Olive Logan. She had at least 1,200 hearers.—Telegram ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... feathers of his bird, while in his eyes was the pride as of a woman over {160} her first-born. A man often carries his gamecock with him as a negro would carry a dog, and he is as ready to back his judgment with his last centavo as was the owner of Mark Twain's "Jumping Frog" before that ill-fated creature dined too heartily on buckshot. Sundays and saints' days are the days for ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... 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 ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... like this, you know: Was reading Mark Twain's 'Life on the Mississippi.' On the first page he observes of that river that it draws its water supply from twenty-eight States, all the way from Delaware to Idaho. I don't just see it. ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... sentences generally to be gauged by their sententiousness; but sometimes he made one doubt his good faith; as when he seriously remarked to a particularly bright young woman that Venice would be a fine city if it were drained. In Mark Twain, this suggestion would have taken rank among his best witticisms; in Grant it was a measure of simplicity not singular. Robert E. Lee betrayed the same intellectual commonplace, in a Virginian form, not to the same degree, but quite distinctly enough for one who ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... water, with a tin dipper reposing quietly on its surface. Nothing unnecessary, everything useful. By the window stands a square pine table, spotted and streaked with ink, to match the floor, which resembles in a homely way MARK TWAIN'S map of Paris on an enlarged scale. Before that table, his head resting on his hands, his eyes glaring on the paper, sits the immortal Bard whose lightest words were to be remembered long after his ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 35, November 26, 1870 • Various
... lily and rose in his verses; I like Whittier for his enthusiasms and moral rectitude. I knew him, and the gentle remembrance of our friendship doubles the pleasure I have in reading his poems. I love Mark Twain—who does not? The gods, too, loved him and put into his heart all manner of wisdom; then, fearing lest he should become a pessimist, they spanned his mind with a rainbow of love and faith. I like Scott for his freshness, dash and large honesty. I love all writers whose minds, like Lowell's, ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... A—— was equally attentive to another young person; and having seen as much of the prospect as we cared to, we were glad to get back to our four-wheeler and our hotel, after a perilous journey almost comparable to Mark Twain's ascent ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... of historical interest here to record the esteem in which Mark Twain held the genius of Mr. Cabell as it was manifested as early as a dozen years ago. Mr. Cabell wrote The Soul of Melicent, or, as it was rechristened on revision, Domnei, at the great humorist's request, and during the long days and nights of his ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... represented in the basest manner, from conventional motives of 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
... singular 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 Warner had become connected ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... and caporal ordinaire, Egyptian and every imaginable kind. After tea we pushed back our chairs and smoked. His conversation was delightful, and showed me at once that he was a man of brilliant gifts, yet an eccentric. I felt much as Mark Twain must have felt when he first met Rudyard Kipling; Twain has summed up, in that inimitable way of his, the feeling of being in the presence of an overwhelming personality. 'I believed that he knew more than any person I had met before, and I knew that he knew that I knew less than any ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... 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 hand at sensational yarns. ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... time to give utterance to his indignation and his faith in dialect-poems which appeal from the heart to the heart. Mr. Walter Hampson, of Normanton, writes in a lighter vein in his Tykes Abrooad (1911); he is our Yorkshire Mark Twain, and his narrative of the adventures of a little party of Yorkshiremen in Normandy and Brittany is full of humour. Songs are scattered through the story, and one of these, "Owd England," finds a place in this collection. ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... a hundred in a chain, a company of ten coming to join them, and large masses waiting in different parts of the road, and taking their places one by one as the procession approached. They looked like a long, thin snake. The marvellous instinct of these small insects, notwithstanding Mark Twain's ingenious stricture on the proverbial "ant," will ever remain a source of the deepest interest and wonder to thinking, ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... over the London one so far as this particular set of "swagger" folk are concerned—it is less hampered by the proprieties. One can be more "free," you know! You may take a little walk into "Old" Cairo, and turning a corner you may catch glimpses of what Mark Twain calls "Oriental simplicity," namely, picturesquely-composed groups of "dear delightful" Arabs whose clothing is no more than primitive custom makes strictly necessary. These kind of "tableaux vivants" or "art ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... had made a pious pilgrimage to Mark Twain's last home at Redding, and, hearing that he had lived at Hartford, I came through there to render my fullest homage. He has always been one of my heroes, you know." She laughingly lifted her hands and counted ...
— Lady Larkspur • Meredith Nicholson
... effect that when the Indians saw the ships of Columbus, they cried out, "Alas, we are discovered!" goes back to a much earlier period, like many another of Mark Twain's gladsome scintillations. So little did Thorfinne and his hardy comrades think of crossing the Atlantic in search of adventure, that they used to take their families along, as though it were a ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... primitive experiences, even with long years of intimate first-hand knowledge. No one doubts Mr. Service's accuracy or sincerity. But many men have had abundance of material, rich and new, only to find it unmanageable. Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling succeeded where thousands have failed. Think of the possibilities of Australia! And from that vast region only one great artist ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... my attention naturally became centered on the characters of Colonel Mulberry Sellars, and Judge Bardwell Slote, the former in a dramatization of "The Gilded Age," by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, and the latter, in a play by Benjamin E. Woolf, called "The Mighty Dollar." Extended investigation revealed the fact that, even if the plays are not lost, they are still unlocated, by the literary executors of Mark Twain on the one hand, and by the family of Mr. Woolf ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists - 1765-1819 • Various
... Mark Twain's hero, suddenly transported back to King Arthur's Court is landed in a surprising and unknown world. But one of King Arthur's knights brought to life at the court of the present German Emperor aside from steam, electricity, gun powder, telegraph and telephones would find the system as ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... Friends and Acquaintances Biographical My First Visit to New 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
... Mark Twain was inadequate to check the thought-struggle which had begun in Erica's brain. Desperate earnestness would not be conquered even by the most ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... crowd thickly upon each other. Among editors and literary men the fearless and ill-fated James King of the Evening Bulletin, J. Ross Browne, the reporter of the first convention and a most interesting writer, Derby the humorist, "Caxton" or W.H. Rhodes, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, the historians Hittell and Bancroft, and the poet ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton
... a book of the meditative order. The writer expresses her thoughts in a manner that is a delightful reminder of 'Reveries of a Bachelor' of Ike Marvel.... In parts it is amusing, in the manner of Mark Twain's 'Sketches.' The combination of humor and sensible reflection results to the reader's delight."—Albany ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post |
