"Mark Twain" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with the more Familiar and Credible. 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 Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... Harvard. They didn't at all belong with the middle-aged roomful. As a matter of fact, her mother knew Mrs. Havenith a little, and so they had dashed in here to save her suit from the rain. They were sitting and smiling at each other against a background of Mark Twain's life-sized head in a broad gilt frame. They faced another life-sized head of Browning, also autographed, but they liked looking at each ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer
... Adams never made any popular demonstrations to chronicle; but wherever Jackson went there went the other Jack, the crude first-fruits of what is now known through the world as "American humor." Jack Downing was Mark Twain and Hosea Biglow and Artemus Ward in one. The impetuous President enraged many and delighted many, but it is something to know that under him a serious people first found that ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... 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 ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... employs in 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 the American ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... in the Scribner retail bookstore, unconscious of the customer's identity, waited one day on the wife of Mark Twain. ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... 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
... 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 ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... series." I am speaking of the extravagant and comic reasonings in which we really meet with this confusion in its pure form, though it requires some looking into to pick it out. For instance, listen to Mark Twain's replies to the reporter who ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... too,—'the Colonies can be completely ignored so far as the European theatre of war is concerned,'—and here again,—'Egypt and South Africa will at once revolt and break away from the empire,' —really, General, your ideas of the British Colonies are superbly funny. Mark Twain wasn't a circumstance ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... 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 ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... watching you for twenty- four hours and see 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 ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... but tried to defend myself by saying that I had only written it for one indulgent eye, and ended lamely by promising that the next time I wrote anything I would be more careful. "I will do as Mark Twain did—put the punctuations at the end, and one ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... 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 ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... 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
... 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, and the galaxy ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... 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 ...
— Snow on the Headlight - A Story of the Great Burlington Strike • Cy Warman
... quite recently the 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 machine ...
— 'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!' • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... 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 with his life insurance policy, some Liberty Bonds, an autograph letter from ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... not accept the hypothesis of a world made for us. Childish pride, 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: ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... open house, 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 ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... 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
... 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
... quaintness and the palpable 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 for his freshness, dash and large honesty. I love all writers whose minds, like Lowell's, bubble ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... 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; ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... sturdy short 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, the ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... 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, ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... 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
... somewhat 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 ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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 ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... results than permanent 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 it was not an unusual thing to be rewarded with a crop of from ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... dress. If the book wishes to tell us that Mary Godwin, child of sixteen, had known afflictions, the fact saunters forth in this nobby outfit: "Mary herself was not unlearned in the lore of pain."—MARK TWAIN. ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... 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
... 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 ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... out mystified. As Mark Twain's friend, Mr. Ballou, remarked about the coffee, Cappy Ricks was a ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... dull days I was made happy by finding a copy of Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad in a store over in Nazareth on the Peruvian side of the Javary River. I took it with me to my hammock, hailing with joy the opportunity of receiving in the wilderness something that promised a word from "God's Own Country." But before I could begin ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... of 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 whit less than the blossom's conscious appreciation of its own beauties. There are ants which ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... 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
... the charges of violence and cruelty, which he brought against all antiquity as well as against modern times, much in the fashion of Swift or the older Mark Twain, Flaubert nursed four grave causes of indignation, made four major charges of folly against modern "Christian" civilization. In religion, we have substituted for Justice the doctrine of Grace. In our sociological ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... pieces, and watched one to see how much he would carry off. He flew across a wide stream and in a short time looked as bloody as a butcher from carrying large pieces; but his patience held out longer than mine. I think one would work as long as Mark Twain's California Jay did trying to fill a miner's cabin with acorns through a knot hole in the roof. They are fond of the berries of the mountain ash, and, in fact, few things come amiss; I believe they do not possess a single good ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph [April, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... speller, writer, reference-book maker, and language itemizer. W. was the man to whom Mark Twain paid a glowing tribute by saying he was a great writer, but his stories were ...
— Who Was Who: 5000 B. C. to Date - Biographical Dictionary of the Famous and Those Who Wanted to Be • Anonymous
... 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
... 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 ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... 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 Common Life. Carleton and ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... 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 ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... 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 to ...
— Mitch Miller • Edgar Lee Masters
... and she proposed that they take it and go immediately to that sacred spot. When they arrived there her historic imagination knew no bounds; her soliloquy partook of the sentiment—in kind only, not in degree—which inspired Mark Twain when he wept over the grave of Adam. In the mean while, Mr. Gordon had gone to the Wannacomet Waterworks, which supplied the town with pure water from the old Washing-pond. He there noted in his note-book that this important movement in ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 3 • Various
... 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 ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... 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 ...
— Beasley's Christmas Party • Booth Tarkington
... she had learnt at 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 ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... agreed that the early death of FRANK NORRIS was a blow; that GEORGE W. CABLE had style; that JOHN FOX, Junior, could tell a good story, but OWEN WISTER a better. My friend interested me greatly by stating that he had been on intimate terms with that great man, MARK TWAIN, and wondered if I had ever heard the story (which he used to tell against himself) of the visitor to his house who, after a very delightful stay, during which the humorist had been at the top of his form, asked his daughter if her father was always ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 5th, 1914 • Various
... at the annual dinner of the Society for the 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 ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... Laura Frazer, the Original "Becky Thatcher," Pouring Tea at Mark Twain's Boyhood Home in Hannibal, Mo., on the Anniversary of the ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... 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
... instinct appears at a very early stage of human development. In boys the instinct to trade or swop articles appears long before they feel any inclination to fall in love or to give much serious thought to religion. The classical example is given by Mark Twain, who relates how Tom Sawyer exchanged one of his own teeth, which had been pulled out that morning, for a tick in the possession of Huckleberry Finn, and then 'the two boys separated, each feeling wealthier than before'. In fact, of course, ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... 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
... 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
... 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, ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... 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 ...
— A Woman's Part in a Revolution • Natalie Harris Hammond
... 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 of ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... could cease bubbling up, or a river turn backward in its course. And what men and women he has had, first and last, at his table; it is impossible to exhaust the list or exaggerate its quality. Horace Greeley, Henry Ward Beecher, E. H. Chapin, Bayard Taylor, Mark Twain, and the Cary sisters, were a few among Americans; and Thackeray, Matthew Arnold, George Augustus Sala, and I know not how many others, from abroad. No catalogue of them, but only types can be given here. He was almost never without people who made no claim to distinction; and ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... out, the master of them all in psychological character analysis; Poe the story-teller would be missing, and the art of the modern short story, which in English sterns from him; Cooper would be lost from our accounting, for all his crudities the best historical novelist after Scott; Mark Twain, Howells, Bret Harte, Irving! The attempt to exalt American literature is grateful if ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... Mark Twain, who made a trip across the continent in 1860 has left this glowing account[14] of a pony and rider that he saw while traveling overland in ...
— The Story of the Pony Express • Glenn D. Bradley
... 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 M. ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... sculpt a second time by a man called ——, as well as I can remember and read. I mustn't criticise a present, and he had very little time to do it in. It is thought by my family to be an excellent likeness of Mark Twain. This poor fellow, by the by, met with the devil of an accident. A model of a statue which he had just finished with a desperate effort was smashed to smithereens ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pure artistic form great 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 has ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... this type in a railway 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 ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... San 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
... 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 ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... 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 ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... reception given by her in honor of a company of authors attending a congress in Washington. It was remarkable for the number of distinguished men and women gathered from all parts of the country, some of whom I had never met before, and among them Mark Twain, Francis Marion Crawford ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... 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 of ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... Leidesdorff, and that's where we miners went, if we could get in. Woodward was a queer chap. Took you in whether you could pay or not. But it was only a man's hotel. There wasn't a woman allowed about the place. He had the only library in town and everybody was welcome to use it. I've often seen Mark Twain and Bret Harte reading ...
— The Lure of San Francisco - A Romance Amid Old Landmarks • Elizabeth Gray Potter and Mabel Thayer Gray
... 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 ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in the Uffizi Gallery Smollett shocked his sensitive contemporaries by his freedom from those sham ecstasies which have too often dogged the footsteps of the virtuosi. Like Scott or Mark Twain at a later date Smollett was perfectly ready to admire anything he could understand; but he expressly disclaims pretensions to the nice discernment and delicate sensibility of the connoisseur. He would never have ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... Mark Twain saw through that deadly seriousness of the pure climber. He saw the fatuity of mere peak-hunting. It impressed him strongly even on the Rigi-Kulm. "We climbed and climbed," he writes in A Tramp Abroad, "and we kept on climbing; we reached ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... woman, and in the midst of a busy life he has, found' 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. The Colne Valley and the country round Huddersfield ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... was soporific; if she desired to listen, she felt that her companion was not trying to bias her judgment by the introduction of dramatic intonation and effect. With an even, untiring correctness of utterance, Miss Skeat read one book just as she read another—M. Thiers or Mr. Henry James, Mark Twain or a Parliamentary Report—it was all one to her. Poor ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... the lower South. A. B. Longstreet, the author of Georgia Scenes, William Tappan Thompson, of Major Jones's Courtship, and Joseph B. Baldwin, of Flush Times in Alabama and Mississippi, struck a rich vein of ludicrous humor which Mark Twain worked out after ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... it seems difficult it is due to our clumsy way of stating it. Thought, like melodies, should run on the line of the least resistance. In the following pages I have eschewed all mystifying polysyllabic verbiage, and as Mark Twain once said, have "confined myself to a categorical statement of facts unincumbered by an obscuring accumulation of metaphor ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... of both in his day. He was a cautious and judicious purchaser of realty. The court records show that at some time or other he was the owner of the most desirable parts of Fentress county. He held title to the land upon which Jamestown, the county seat, now stands, which is the "Obedstown" of Mark Twain's "Gilded Age." He owned "Rock Castle," a tract of hardwood timber that is enclosed by mountains and can be reached by but one passageway, a place that became famous during the Civil War. He bought and sold much of the county's best ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... I 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 upon her fingers—"'The Jumping ...
— Lady Larkspur • Meredith Nicholson
... 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, led to undertaking ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... a 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
... 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 ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... 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 ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... are an industrious, simple people, devoted to agriculture and hospitable in the extreme—a little addicted to thieving, perhaps, but then that is scarcely considered a sin in the heart of Africa. They are clothed (to use Mark Twain's expression) in little but a smile, a bead or two here and there being considered ample raiment; nevertheless they are modest in their ways and are on the whole about the best ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... Mahoney, the garageman. He's got a lot of Perry prints of famous pictures in his office. Or old Bingham Playfair, that died here 'bout a year ago—lived seven miles out. He was a captain in the Civil War, and knew General Sherman, and they say he was a miner in Nevada right alongside of Mark Twain. You'll find these characters in all these small towns, and a pile of savvy in every single one of them, if you just dig ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... of polished slabs of marble, as figments of a troubled imagination, recall the glowing description of the great kingdom of the Sandwich Islands—with its king, its cabinet ministers, its parliament, its army and navy, which Mark Twain has fitly characterized as "an attempt to navigate a sardine dish with Great Eastern machinery"; and it suggested also the Indian chief humorously mentioned by Irving as generously "decked out in cocked hat and military coat, in contrast with his breech clout and leathern ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... know that in scores they will pay at the doors—these millions in darkness who grope— For a glimpse of Mark Twain or a word from Hall Caine or a reading from Anthony Hope? We are ignorant here of the glorious career which conspicuous talent awaits: Not a master of style but is making his pile by the lectures ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... especially those which relate to slavery and depict negro character, have had a world-wide currency. Among other novelists were Paulding and Sedgwick, and more recently, Howells, James, Bret Harte, Cable, and Aldrich. The most distinguished humorist has been S. M. Clemens (Mark Twain). ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... 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 ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... 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
... 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
... characteristic native product of social conditions and home talent. One 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, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... with the works of Bourget will recognize here again his well known antipathy for the United States of America. Mark Twain in the late 1800's felt obliged to rebut some of Bourget's prejudice: "What Paul Bourget Thinks of ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... American humor is that of the grotesque. It is characteristic in Mark Twain's best work, and it is characteristic of most of those others who have won fame as purveyors of laughter. The American tourist brags ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... one of his favorite spots in New York, and he spent many hours there watching the children playing about. A day he always recalled with special pleasure was the one when he had spent a whole forenoon in the Square talking with Mark Twain. ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... Olympus have 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 which never ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... correspondent sent in an old typewritten sheet, faded by age, containing the following letter over the signature of Mark Twain: ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... 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 ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... 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
... Edison, Luther Burbank, Albert Einstein, Paul Ehrlich, Ernst Haeckel, Robert Koch, Fridjof Nansen, and Swante Arrhenius. What consolation can the theists derive from the religious views of Shelley, Swinburne, Meredith, Buchanan, Keats, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Mark Twain, and ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... When Mark Twain was in Bombay, a few years ago, he met with an unusual experience for a mortal. He was a guest of the late Mr. Tata, a famous Parsee merchant, and received a great deal of attention. All the foreigners in the city knew him, and had read his books, and there are in Bombay ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... that, shams through and through! We, you and I are no exceptions to the universal rule of, to quote Mark Twain, 'pretending to be what we ain't.' We are polite and civil when we feel ugly and cross; while in company we assume a pleasant expression although inwardly we may be raging. All our appurtenances are make-believes. ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... landlord threatens to eject us if I don't pay what I owe. 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 ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... and I remember the manner 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 to some terrible ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • 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 experience, ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... 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
... 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 ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... that Man, the noblest creature of creation, made in the image of God, capable of the flights of attainment that distinguish a Christ, a Caesar, a Plato, a Shakespeare, a Shelley, a Newton, is so described, not alone by hopeless pessimists like Koheleth, Swift, and Mark Twain, but by the common law, the common opinion, the common assumptions of mankind? Because the development of slavery and parasitism in human society, the subjection of the weak to the strong, the dull and base to the clever and headstrong, set up a vicious cycle: the liberation ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... 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 earth is called among ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... character which make the book so attractive to the English, who enjoy these more than the Americans,—the latter delighting rather in what is grotesque and extravagant, like the elaborate absurdities of "Mark Twain." But this humor is more than that of a shrewd and thrifty English farmer's wife; it belongs to human nature. We have seen such voluble sharp, sagacious, ironical, and worldly women among the farm-houses of New England, and heard them use ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... 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 of the wheel. He not only had to memorize the whole river, but be able ...
— Thin Edge • Gordon Randall Garrett
... plagiarized Doctor Johnson who, on hearing that Goldsmith had debts of several thousand pounds, in admiration exclaimed, "Was ever poet so trusted before!" Other good friends ascertained the amount of the claim and paid it, just as Colonel H. H. Rogers graciously cleared up the liabilities of Mark Twain, after the author of "Huckleberry Finn" had landed his business craft ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... wearing apparel. Especially at night, 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 ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... is quite curious that it should be so difficult to find time to keep up this journal. Mark Twain, in that best of burlesques, The Innocents Abroad affirms, if I remember rightly, that you could not condemn your worst enemy to greater suffering than to bind him down to keep an accurate ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... 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 found was a modern American city with straight streets, ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... of fun, too, remained keen as ever, and, strange as it may seem, one of the very few books which she liked to have read aloud was Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"; the dry humour of it—the natural way in which everything is told from a boy's point of view—and the vivid and beautiful descriptions of river scenery—all charmed her. One of Twain's shorter tales, "Aurelia's unfortunate Young Man," was ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... to make ornaments of them, to train them to be useless. Girls, as well as boys, should be taught to be useful. They should be taught that those who do not labor are parasites. If some do not work, others have to work too hard. The story is told of Mark Twain that he dined with an English nobleman who boasted that he was an earl and did not labor. "In our country," said Mark Twain, "we do not call people of your class earls; we ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... Mr. Mark Twain: The within parson, which I have set to poetry under the name and style of "He Done His Level Best," was one among the whitest men I ever see, and it ain't every man that knowed him that can find it in his heart to say he's glad the poor cuss ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... maidens, who before this exaggerated interference would have been content with the lightest of wines, think it smart to break the law every day and night of their lives. I related to my audience that Mr. Clemens, (better known as Mark Twain), had taken me in to dinner many years ago at the house of a namesake of mine (Mrs. Charles Tennant, whose daughter Dorothy married Stanley) and had told me of a great American temperance orator who, ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... of 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 ages. That is one ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... is "the logical successor to O. Henry"—and it is misleading. Any humorist who tried to follow in the tracks of O. Henry would be merely an imitator and the task would be as unwise as though O. Henry had cramped his own freedom in an effort to walk in the footprints of Mark Twain or any other predecessor in the field ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... presumably be as tedious a subject of study as the lucubrations of the very dullest English moralist or American humorist; a course of reading digestible only by such constitutions as could survive and assimilate a diet of Martin Tupper or Mark Twain. And yet even in the very homeliest doggrel of Heywood's or Shakespeare's time there is something comparatively not contemptible; the English, when not alloyed by fantastic or pedantic experiment, has a simple ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... writing. These were days 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, many years later, in one of the last things that he wrote: ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... 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, ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... leather-faced old party with the bashful ways and the simple look in his steady eyes. The grizzled mustache curlin' close around his mouth corners, the heavy eyebrows, and the thick head of gray hair somehow reminds me of Mark Twain, as we used to see him a few years back walkin' up Fifth-ave. Only Uncle Jimmy was a little ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... 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 ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... idea of getting me cultivated is to read to me from the great Masters of literature and funny books too, like Mark Twain and the Nonsense Thology. Then I say what I think of them, and she just lets me develop along those lines, which is ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... agree that that's Hardy's philosophy. It's fair enough to say that Hardy's stories, and still more his poems, paint chiefly the gloomy and hopeless situations in life, just as Mark Twain and Aristophanes painted the comic ones. But Mark Twain was very far from thinking the world was a joke, and I doubt whether Hardy regards it at heart as ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... 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. Belloc, ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 wait the return of the elder Dryfoos from the West, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the old trail that Mark Twain crawled over in a stage-coach and afterward wrote about in his immortal Roughing It. The Limited, traveling forty-odd miles an hour, was skipping through the lower part of Wyoming before turning southward into Colorado. We were in the midst of an expanse of desolation ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... or find a good story, invent one! Perhaps you have scruples as to the latter. But a story is not a lie; if so, what would become of the noble tribe of novel-writers! Mark Twain gives a very humorous account of the way in which he killed his conscience. Probably many speakers who retail good things might make confession in ...
— Toasts - and Forms of Public Address for Those Who Wish to Say - the Right Thing in the Right Way • William Pittenger
... 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
... Sands Ballade of Yule Poscimur On his Dead Sea-Mew From Meleager On the Garland Sent to Rhodocleia A Galloway Garland Celia's Eyes Britannia Gallia The Fairy Minister To Robert Louis Stevenson For Mark Twain's Jubilee Poems Written under the Influence of Wordsworth Mist Lines Lines Ode to Golf Freshman's Term A toast Death in June To Correspondents Ballade of Difficult Rhymes Ballant o'Ballantrae Song by the Sub-Conscious ...
— Ban and Arriere Ban • Andrew Lang
... 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. I recall one of them, ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... whom Mr. Matthews, the well-known librarian of Bristol, tells us, who, being a candidate for the post of assistant librarian, boldly pronounced Rider Haggard to be the author of the Idylls of the King, Southey of The Mill on the Floss, and Mark Twain of Modern Painters, undoubtedly placed her own ideas at the service of Bristol alongside the preconceived conceptions of Mr. Matthews; but she was rejected all ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell |
