"Mark Twain" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... maker, and language itemizer. W. was the man to whom Mark Twain paid a glowing tribute by saying he was a great writer, but his stories ...
— Who Was Who: 5000 B. C. to Date - Biographical Dictionary of the Famous and Those Who Wanted to Be • Anonymous
... Missouri River town. The citizens, so far as 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 ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... 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, ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... body forth: there is room for the manifestation of this prime literary gift in all sort of subjects. It may be shown in a fable of AEsop, in Robinson Crusoe, in a children's story, in Mark Twain's boyish experiences on the Mississippi, in a Barrack-room Ballad of Rudyard Kipling, in Thackeray's Esmond, in Shelley's Ode to a Skylark, in either a comedy of Shakespeare or his Hamlet, in a sonnet of Dante's Vita Nuova or in his Inferno. AEsop's communication of his ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... guilty of such a thing. He would go away on the next train and 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 a warning at the crossing. ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... contributor to the weekly columns 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 ran ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... 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, reasoning, ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... 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 ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... Sleep. Dreams. Ghosts are identical with Waking Dreams. Possibility of being Asleep when we think we are Awake. Dreams shared by several People. Story of the Dog Fanti. The Swithinbank Dream. Common Features of Ghosts and Dreams. Mark Twain's Story. Theory of Common-sense. Not Logical. Fulfilled Dreams. The Pig in the Palace. The Mignonette. Dreams of Reawakened Memory. The Lost Cheque. The Ducks' Eggs. The Lost Key. Drama in Dreams. The Lost Securities. The Portuguese Gold-piece. St. Augustine's Story. The Two ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... vindictiveness is, from a 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 ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... this hollow gaiety 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 ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... have 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 songs ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... masterpiece by Mark Twain was one of the bookseller's treasures. Not even Helen had ever been permitted to read it; and she had shrewdly judged that it was not in her line, for though she knew perfectly well where he kept it (together ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... from American humourists; and 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 and Dickens." ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... 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
... perhaps 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 ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... 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 ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... 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 lovable ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... 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 ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... third chapter of 'The Gilded Age' (Hartford, Conn., 1873) by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, there is a piece, 'Uncle Daniel's Apparition and Prayer', so similar to 'The Power of Prayer' that I quote it almost entire. Uncle Dan'l (a Negro), his wife, his young mistress, and his two young masters were sitting on ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... obtain, at 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
... 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 ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... 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 was desirous that ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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
... 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 bush, those medals, copious as the Queen's Arms over the shop-windows ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... John Quincy 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 it knew ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... not burn the universities—yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.... Suppose Oxford had snared and disemboweled Shakespeare! Suppose Harvard had set its stamp upon Mark Twain! ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... 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 in opposite ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... to lend it is to lose 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
... 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 ...
— Voyage of the Liberdade • Captain Joshua Slocum
... whether, if you have the brain of a mouse, prison- camp life can be made comfortable, no matter how many greasy packs of cards you have. And lousy, besides! At times one had to laugh over what Mark Twain called "the damfool ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... preservation of his land. Even if he was of the conservative old New England stock, the generous soil of the West, the freedom from social restraint, and the lessened labors of the farm, led him into more happy-go-lucky methods than he had been accustomed to in the East. It was Mark Twain who once said that if you plant a New England deacon in Texas, you will find him in about a year with a game chicken under his arm, riding a mule on Sunday to a cock-fight. When farms were opened in the southeastern counties of Minnesota ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... assented Jimmy lugubriously. "I've played the biggest joke of all on myself. By heck! I've joked myself out of my own job, and that's the limit. Joe Miller never did that and Mark Twain, Josh Billings, Bill Nye and George Ade, none of 'em ever reached that height of humor. The only difference between us is that they got cash for their jokes, whereas all the pay I get is the boot and the chance to go ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... 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 ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... 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
... and his daughter were going to Green River, the county-seat, and said I might go along, so I did, as I could file there as well as at the land office; and oh, that trip! I had more fun to the square inch than Mark Twain or Samantha Allen ever provoked. It took us a whole week to go and come. We camped out, of course, for in the whole sixty miles there was but one house, and going in that direction there is not a tree to be seen, nothing but sage, sand, and sheep. About noon ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... sat on oak chairs, except the four or five who crowded on a 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 was a good Englishman ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... 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 ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... and book-collecting. It was named, very obviously, after the famous library of the same name, and not only became in our city a sort of shrine for local worshipers of fine bindings and rare editions, but was visited occasionally by pilgrims from afar. The Bodleian has entertained Mark Twain, Joseph Jefferson, and other literary and histrionic celebrities. It possesses quite a collection of personal mementos of distinguished authors, among them a paperweight which once belonged to Goethe, a lead pencil used by Emerson, an autograph ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... 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 and art ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... chairman of a monster meeting in Toronto when ten thousand people who tried to hear Theodore Roosevelt speak on behalf of that year's Victory Loan of Canada were turned away. For some hours he had been in company with a man whose mastery of the unusual was almost the equal of Mark Twain's. If ever he had a chance to be startled out of his headmaster poise, here it was. But he made a long, tedious preamble of a speech the only sentence of which that sticks in my memory is that sincerely girlish utterance of Portia to Antonio ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... As Mark Twain's friend, Mr. Ballou, remarked about the coffee, Cappy Ricks was a little ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... 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 ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... 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 best farming-land ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... been such intimate friends since my childhood that the scenes of their exploits are of much more moment to me than Waterloo and Austerlitz. I cannot forbear laughing at myself, however, for my holy rage over Greek mythology, as founded upon no better ground than that upon which Mark Twain apologized for his admiration for Fenimore Cooper's Indians, for he admitted that they were a defunct race of beings ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... you 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 your lines from ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... bartering for the day's 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 he is allowed to snooze the ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... school. 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 the ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... between Calais and La Panne it was inspected—texture, weight and reading matter, front and reverse sides, upside down and under glass—by some several hundred sentries, officials and petty highwaymen. It suffered everything but attack by bayonet. I found myself repeating that way to madness of Mark Twain's: ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... 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" is told almost entirely in frontier ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... of many peculiarities. Entering his house, you find nothing in the place where you expected it. "Don Quixote," with, all its windmills mixed up with "Dr. Dick on the Sacraments," Mark Twain's "Jumping Frog," and "Charnock on the Attributes." Passing across the room, you stumble against the manuscript of his last lecture, or put your foot in a piece of pie that has fallen off the end of the writing table. You mistake his essay on the "Copernican ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... useful to the future generations who will people the Dominion. Nor does Canada now lack an imitator of Punch, in the humorous line. It is noteworthy that whilst America has produced humorists like 'Sam Slick,' Artemus Ward, Mark Twain, and others, no American rival to Punch has yet appeared in Boston or New York. The attempts that have heretofore been made have been generally coarse caricatures—for example, the political cartoons in Harper's Weekly, which are never characterized by those keen artistic touches ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... thinking of it when I unlocked the door. In fact I didn't begin to think of it again until, in slippers and dressing-gown, I had settled down for a comfortable read. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, to influence my imagination—in that way. The book was an old favourite, Mark Twain's Up the Mississippi, and I sat in the armchair with a large bottle of lager beer at my elbow and my pipe ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... American 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 vein, such as the "Tramp Abroad"; produced ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... of quiet and deep happiness. He read much, often aloud in the evening—fairy-tales, of which he was devotedly fond, legendary lore of different countries, mediaeval romances, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Benvenuto Cellini's Memoirs, Victor Hugo, Heine; and also Mark Twain. Later, in the spring, the days were devoted partly to composition and partly to long walks with his wife in the beautiful Frankfort woods, where was suggested to MacDowell the particular mood that found embodiment, ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... she revels 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, sure ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... reader may consult with advantage Meadows Taylor, The Confessions of a Thug, the first edition of which appeared in 1839; and the vivid account by Mark Twain in ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... 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 called to ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... TREBELL. Thank you. Mark Twain's a jolly fellow. He has courage ... comic courage. That's what's wanted. Nothing stands against it. You be-little yourself by laughing ... then all this world and the last and the next grow little too ... and so you grow great again. Switch ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... did not publish Mark Twain's books, the humorist was a frequent visitor to the retail store, and occasionally he would wander back to the publishing department located at the rear of the store, which was then ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... 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 ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... countess for the use of families of moderate means, and the book was very well worth buying if only for the sake of a little mild amusement when the spirit is in danger of growing too serious for mental health. A great chapter in humorous literature is that in which Mark Twain places on record how for a few brief but exciting days he edited an agricultural paper while the editor was, perforce, absent from his chair. Good, it is to read the answers he returned to rural inquirers who wished for counsel in relation to the difficulties ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... setting, the wit and wisdom of Washington Irving, Oliver W. Holmes, James R. Lowell, Artemus Ward, Mark Twain, and Bret Harte, and ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... 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 ...
— 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
... 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 Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... I 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 ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... 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
... be interesting to note what Mark Twain wrote on India education about the same period when Taine wrote this text: "apparently, then, the colleges of India were doing what our high schools have long been doing—richly over-supplying the market for highly educated service; and thereby doing a damage to the scholar, and through ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Mark Twain William Dean Howells Edgar Allan Poe Walt Whitman Henry James Harold Frederic Kate Chopin Stephen Crane Frank Norris When I Knew Stephen Crane On the ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... Mark Twain came to the Rand. He visited the men at Pretoria. My husband did the honours of the prison, and introduced him to the Reformers. He talked a long while to them, sitting on a dry goods box. Expressed his satisfaction at finding only one journalist in ...
— A Woman's Part in a Revolution • Natalie Harris Hammond
... fine. I was very glad I went. Whitelaw Reid sat on one side of Sir Henry Irving and Horace Porter on the other. Howells and Warner came next. John Russell Young and Mark Twain, Millet, Palmer, Hutton, Gilder and a lot more were there. There were no newspaper men, not even critics nor actors there, which struck me as interesting. The men were very nice to me. Especially Young, Reid, Irving ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... accounts of the 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
... 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 ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... But even 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 delightful ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... and loved to divert 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 but loquacious henchman, ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... tell of the great dread Mark Twain was wont to feel, during the exhaustion and reaction he felt at the close of each of his lectures, lest he should become incapable of further writing and lecturing and therefore become dependent upon his friends and die a pauper. How wonderfully he conquered this demon of perpetual ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... or byway of life or letters that happened to take the author's fancy at the moment of writing. Some one has said of that book that in its abrupt swingings from laughter to tears, from irreverence to awe, from the ridiculous to the sublime, one finds the spirits of Dostoyevski and Mark Twain blended. ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... 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
... 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
... they are an old minority than because they are a new one. Free thought has exhausted its own freedom. It is weary of its own success. If any eager freethinker now hails philosophic freedom as the dawn, he is only like the man in Mark Twain who came out wrapped in blankets to see the sun rise and was just in time to see it set. If any frightened curate still says that it will be awful if the darkness of free thought should spread, we can only answer him in the high and powerful words of Mr. ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... which would be ridiculous did not its very simplicity lend it something poetic, alone inspires it. Man is but one of the links of an immense chain, of the two ends of which we are ignorant. [See Mark Twain's essay: 'What is ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... gendarmes"—but surely, dear Atlas, when the art critic of the Times, suffering possibly from chronic catarrh, is wafted in at the Grosvenor without guide or compass, and cannot by mere sense of smell distinguish between oil and water colour, he ought, like Mark Twain, "to inquire." ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... 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 in the English language ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... the principal aim of these tales of the old days in California, that are gone "for good." Mark Twain says in his preface to "Roughing It" that there is a great deal of information in his work which he regrets very much but which really could not be helped, as "information seems to stew out of me naturally, like the precious ottar of roses ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill
... 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 with ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... 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, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 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, ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... continents on Mars. But further away there might be a little difficulty; from Uranus and Neptune the different regions on our earth can never have been distinguished, and therefore we must add another line to indicate the particular globe of the solar system which contains Europe. Mark Twain tells us that there was always one thing in astronomy which specially puzzled him, and that was to know how we found out the names of the stars. We are, of course, in hopeless ignorance of the name by which this ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... distributed, or worn in turns by each one. The shirt which I gave my guide, Yantiwau, for much arduous toil, was worn by one and another alternately. Much as the savage at first desires to possess some garment, it does not take long for him to tire of it. All agree with Mark Twain, that "the human skin is the most comfortable of all costumes," and, clothed in the sunlight, the human form divine ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... 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 written all the fairy books (an European reputation in nurseries and ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... the cows would come 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 of this drawback, it was pleasant to be ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... in which he said: "Galileo said: 'The world moves round,' and the world does move round," upon the platform of the Mercantile Hall in St. Louis—one of the grandest things out. [Laughter and applause.] The next great occasion that I had to come before the public was Mark Twain's lecture on the Sandwich Islands, which I was sent to report. And when I look to my left here I see Colonel Anderson, whose very face gives me an idea that Bennett has got some telegraphic despatch and is just about to send me ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... were disappointing. I had been, in my childhood, a fascinated peruser of Mark Twain's "Roughing It," and his picture of Honolulu—or rather my picture formed from his description of it—demanded something novel in foliage and architecture, and a great acreage of tropical vegetation. What we really ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... "she is conducting a fair in London for soldiers' wives." My next remark was in the realm of ethics. I had heard that the father of the present Duke was a good deal of a rake and asked the young man whether that was true or not. He said he thought it was like the obituary notice of Mark Twain—very much exaggerated. ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... beautiful; but that there was the same sap, the same life-current running through it all; and I compared the treatment of woman in all Anglo-Saxon literature, whether on one side of the Atlantic or the other, from Chaucer to Mark Twain, with the treatment of the same subject by French writers from Rabelais to Zola. To this he answered that in his opinion the strength of American literature arises from the inherent Anglo-Saxon religious sentiment. He expressed a liking for ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... 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
... 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, ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... Spirit of Nationality. Contemporary History. The Short Story and its Development. Bret Harte. The Local-Color Story and Some Typical Writers. The Novel since 1876. Realism in Recent Fiction. Howells. Mark Twain. Various Types of Realism. Dialect Stories. Joel Chandler Harris. Recent Romances. Historical Novels. Poetry since 1876. Stedman and Aldrich. The New Spirit in Poetry. Joaquin Miller. Dialect Poems. The Poetry of ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... 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 ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... as usual with the rising sun, and we set out, twenty-five to a guide. I transmitted Mark Twain's name of "Billfinger" to our man, and he was very much pleased by this notable mark of distinction; in fact, he felt that he had to speak and act up to his title; but his voice gave out in the second round, and he had to whisper his historical ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... 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 ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... two authors,' said Lady Durwent, forcing a smile, 'knew of each other, anyway. It's like asking H. G. Wells if he ever heard of Mark Twain.' ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... 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 to ...
— Mitch Miller • Edgar Lee Masters
... the unfortunates whose sisters of the street did not disdain two years previously to share with her the same house. She also found in prison opportunity to study English and its literature, and to familiarize herself with the great American writers. In Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Thoreau, and ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... not so impertinent. Many literary people proclaim their indifference to and even contempt for music—as if their announcement meant anything more than their music deafness, their unfortunate exclusion from a great art. Mark Twain used to advertise his preference for the pianola over the piano—as if that proved anything against the playing of Paderewski. Similarly, he acted the bull in the china-shop in regard to Christian Science, which cannot be the accepted creed of millions of men and women of intelligence and ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... Omar Khayyam, Volumes of Shelley And Venerable Bede, Machiavelli And Captain Mayne Reid, Fox upon Martyrs And Liddell and Scott, Stubbs on the Charters, The works of La Motte, The Seasons by Thomson, And Paul de Verlaine, Theodore Mommsen And Clemens (Mark Twain), The Rocks of Hugh Miller, The Mill on the Floss, The Poems of Schiller, The Iliados, Don Quixote (Cervantes), La Pucelle by Voltaire, Inferno (that's Dante's), And Vanity Fair, Conybeare-Howson, Brillat-Savarin, And Baron Munchausen, Mademoiselle De Maupin, ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... left the Golden Era, joining Charles Henry Webb and others in a new literary venture, the Californian. It was a brilliant weekly. Among the contributors were Mark Twain, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Prentice Mulford. Harte continued his delightful "Condensed Novels" and contributed poems, stories, sketches, and book reviews. "The Society on the Stanislaus," "John Brown of Gettysburg," and "The Pliocene ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... Hotel Billfinger, which I'd like to try, because Mark Twain's guide in 'Innocents Abroad' was named ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... combativeness carries them beyond their real span of existence either in years or achievement. Thus, the mind shows its mastery over matter. Alexander Pope was still writing while propped upon the pillows of his death bed. Mark Twain joked with friends when he knew his hour was ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... Fiction. Emile Zola Literary 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
... retained, for the Mississippi is 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
... ancient wash-stand and a tin wash-basin, and by its side a pail of 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 ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 35, November 26, 1870 • Various
... probable that anything so ridiculous as the "Magic Flute" story was ever before written. It might have been the concerted effort of Artemus Ward, Theodore Hook, Bill Nye, and Mark Twain. But an effort at coherence must be made in the putting together of this story, because the opera is, above all things, one that every man, woman, and child should know. Mozart's lovely music could not be ruined, even ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... distinctive flavor 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 of ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... adaptable instruments to go about the world with, should tire of them and wish to get rid of them, but so it happened at a very early stage. It must have been a consequence, I think, of growing too fast. Mark Twain remarked about a dachshund that it seemed to want another pair of legs in the middle to prevent it sagging. Now, some lizards are so long that they cannot keep from sagging, and their progress becomes a painful ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... 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 ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... not know whether it is an effect of the war or not, but during 1917, even more than during 1916, American magazines have been almost absolutely devoid of humor. Save for Irvin S. Cobb, on whom the mantle of Mark Twain has surely fallen, and for Seumas O'Brien, whom Mr. Dooley must envy, I have found American fiction to be ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... 'grown-up' sights. Picture-galleries and cathedrals were only a drag to her, and if the experiences that were put into Rosella's mouth for the benefit of her untravelled sisters could have been written down, they would have been as unconventional as Mark Twain's adventures. Rosella went through the whole tour, and left a leg behind in the hinge of a door, but in compensation brought home a Paris bonnet and mantle. She seemed to have been her young mistress's chief comfort, next to an occasional game of play ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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 ...
— Snow on the Headlight - A Story of the Great Burlington Strike • Cy Warman
... 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 father and mother and ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... not 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
... 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... entangled grass or sticks. Like an Indian, I instinctively observe everybody's ears, which are unerring indices of character. I can sustain, and always could endure, incredible fasts, but for this I need coffee in the morning. "Mark Twain"—whom I saw yesterday at his villa, as I correct this proof—also has this peculiar Indian-like or American faculty of observing innumerable little things which no European would ever think of. There is, I think, a great ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... enjoys to such an extent the close personal affection, individual yet national, that is given to Mr. Samuel L. Clemens. He is ours, he is one of us, we have a personal pride in him—dear "Mark Twain," the beloved child of the American nation. And it was through our laughter that ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... 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, he was satisfied." ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... 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, ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... book of truth and humor. One of the first stories by an American that tell what America has done and is doing "over there." It is a tale such as Mark Twain would have written had he lived to do his ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... government in the arts; and it was this idea that had never yet been fully developed in regard to it. That was what must be done in the speeches at the dinner, and the speeches must be reported. Then it would go like wildfire. He asked March whether he thought Mr. Depew could be got to come; Mark Twain, he was sure, would come; he was a literary man. They ought to invite Mr. Evarts, and the Cardinal and the leading Protestant divines. His ambition stopped at nothing, nothing but the question of expense; there he had to ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... 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
... desire to write some verses for your album; so, if you will give me the entry among your gods, goddesses, and godlets, there will be nothing wanting but the Muse. I think of the verses like Mark Twain; sometimes I wish fulsomely to belaud you; sometimes to insult your city and fellow-citizens; sometimes to sit down quietly, with the slender reed, and troll a few staves of Panic ecstasy - but fy! fy! as my ancestors ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a choice, new collection of effective recitations, sketches, stories, poems, monologues; the favorite numbers of world-famed humorists such as James Whitcomb Riley, Eugene Field, Mark Twain, Finley Peter Dunne, W. J. Lampton, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Chas. Batell Loomis, Wallace Irwin, Richard Mansfield, Bill Nye, S. E. Kiser, Tom Masson, and others. It is the best book for home entertainment, and the most useful for teachers, orators, ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... 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 legends and folk-lore ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... 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 experience, particularly ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... this. No doubt, in his mind he was saying that something in the way of a reception far less warm was hovering over the heads of the two "innocents abroad." That made Thad think of Mark Twain, and he wondered whether the illustrious Tom Sawyer and his chum, Huckleberry Finn, had ever arranged a more fetching reception committee than this one ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson
... 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
... 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
... books of Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Mrs. Prentiss, Mark Twain, Dr. Mayo, Miss Phelps, Miss Alcott, Mrs. Stowe, Bayard Taylor, and most of our more popular authors, there are, in like manner, various rival editions, and no one house, however good its intentions, can afford to make a practice of paying these authors, as its neighbors cannot be ...
— International Copyright - Considered in some of its Relations to Ethics and Political Economy • George Haven Putnam
... scent of 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 ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... She looked at the address, "Miss Fanny Brandeis." She went to the kitchen for a crowbar, and came back, still in her hat and coat. She pried open the box expertly, tore away the wrappings, and disclosed a gleaming leather-bound set of Balzac, and beneath that, incongruously enough, Mark Twain. ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... behind him on the 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 in a storm, ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... 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 related to you, before ...
— The Autobiography of a Play - Papers on Play-Making, II • Bronson Howard
... of his law-books, I don't believe he's ever read anything but Robinson Crusoe and the Bible and Mark Twain. Oh, you should have heard her talk about it!—'I couldn't bear it another day,' she said, 'I couldn't STAND it! In all the time I've known him I don't believe he's ever asked me a single question—except when he asked if ...
— Beasley's Christmas Party • Booth Tarkington
... has perhaps some advantage 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 studies" give quite a thrill of novelty to Cairene-English Society,—a ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... and there was some faint pleasure in listening to their crackle. 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 and day during the worst ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... 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 ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... 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," which ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... man of thirty or thereabouts; very good-natured, and humorous. When Chowpereh speaks in his dry Mark Twain style, the whole camp laughs. I never quarrel with Chowpereh, never did quarrel with him. A kind word given to Chowpereh is sure to be reciprocated with a good deed. He is the strongest, the healthiest, the amiablest, ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... explain the power of Beethoven's Scherzos; only through his own experience of life can the hearer fathom their secrets. The expression of real humor, akin to that spirit which is found in Cervantes, Swift, Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln, was a genuine contribution of Beethoven. Deep thinkers alone are capable of humor which, to quote a recent writer, is "that faculty of imagination so humane and sympathetic ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... 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. Delaware, ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... the reef, and near enough to hear that deep sound of the surf which, through the ever serene summer years girdles the Hawaiian Islands with perpetual thunder, before the pilot glided alongside, bringing the news which Mark Twain had prepared us to receive with interest, that "Prince Bill" had been unanimously elected to the throne. The surf ran white and pure over the environing coral reef, and as we passed through the narrow channel, we almost ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... to oppose the Church 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 death ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... a man fails in the great moment is he necessarily all a coward. Mark Twain was once talking to a friend of mine on the subject of courage in men, and spoke of a man whose name is associated with a book that has become a classic. "I knew him well," he said, "and I knew him as a brave ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... of married ladies at the home of Dr. J.G. Holland, where I gave an idea of the newest books. Doctor Holland gave me a department, "Bric-a-brac," in his magazine—Scribner's Magazine; and I was honoured by a request from the editors of the Galaxy to take the "Club Room" from which Mark Twain had just resigned. Meeting him soon after at a dinner, he said with his characteristic drawl: "Awful solemn, ain't it, having to be funny every month; worse than a funeral." I started a class in my own apartment ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... vols., 1871). The late Prof. Palmer's "Life of Haroun Al-Raschid" (London, 1881), is not much more than a brief popular sketch. The references to The Nights in English and other European literatures are innumerable; but I cannot refrain from quoting Mark Twain's identification of Henry the Eighth with Shahryar (Huckleberry Finn, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... often so sadly vulgar and so offensive that a little varnish improves them. In this sense, and when it comes from a feeling of shame or good-will, hypocrisy deserves a good deal of the eulogy which Mark Twain has heaped on it in his charming satire, "The Decadence ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... 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 |
