mark-twain

The government of my country snubs honest simplicity but fondles artistic villainy, and I think I might have developed into a very capable pickpocket if I had remained in the public service a year or two.

If you hold a cat by the tail, you learn things you can't learn any other way.--Mark Twain

You can't pray a lie--I found that out.

...why is my cat a Muse? the cat has the rare grace of never saying a word too much_ Mark Twain ...that's why ...

Heaven is by favor; if it were by merit your dog would go in and you would stay out. Of all the creatures ever made (man) is the most detestable. Of the entire brood, he is the only one... that possesses malice. He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain.

No alien land in all the world has any deep strong charm for me but one, no other land could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things leave me, but it abides me; other things change, but it remains the same. For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of it surfbeat is in my ear; I can see its garland crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud wrack; I can feel the woodland solitudes, I can hear the splash of its brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago. -MARK TWAIN in an 1889 Dinner Speech at Delmonico's in New York to honor two baseball teams that had just returned from touring the Pacific, including Honolulu.

This river is famed in atrocious song and verse; the most prevalent motif is one which attempts to make of the river an ersatz father figure. Actually, the Mississippi River is a treacherous and sinister body of water whose eddies and currents yearly claim many lives. I have never known anyone who would even venture to stick his toe in its polluted waters, which seethe with sewage, industrial waste, and deadly insecticides. Even the fish are dying. Therefore, the Mississippi as Father-God-Moses-Daddy-Phallus-Pops is an altogether false motif began, I would imagine, by that dreary fraud, Mark Twain. This failure to make contact with reality is, however, characteristic of almost all of America__ __rt._ Any connection between American art and American nature is purely coincidental, but this is only because the nation as a whole has no contact with reality. That is only one of the reasons why I have always been forced to exist on the fringes of its society, consigned to the Limbo reserved for this who do know reality when they see it.

Even the ugliest person's cellulite is more attractive than the most beautiful supermodel's lower intestine.' I'd put that on a T-shirt but probably Mark Twain already said it.

The source of all humor is not laughter, but sorrow.

Conservatism is the blind and fear-filled worship of dead radicals.

The signs of excessive indulgence in this destructive pastime are easily detectable. They are these: A disposition to eat, to drink, to smoke, to meet together convivially, to laugh, to joke, and tell indelicate stories_ and mainly, a yearning to paint pictures.

Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilt.

The highest perfection of politeness is only a beautiful edifice, built, from the base to the dome, of graceful and gilded forms of charitable and unselfish lying.

You gwyne to have considerable trouble in yo' life, en considerable joy. Sometimes you gwyne to git hurt, en sometimes you gwyne to git sick; but every time you's gwyne to git well agin.

Never have a battle of wits with an unarmed person.

It don't make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person's conscience ain't got no sense, and just goes for him anyway.

Do you know who Samuel Langhorne Clemens is, Antonio?_ Bessie asked.__o, chood I?_ he said. __e is best known as Mark Twain, the author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,_ she said.__ have herd of the story, but I hav not red the booc,_ he said.__ell, you should read it,_ she said. __t is excellent reading. An American classic. Mark Twain worked in Schoharie for a while,_ she said.__s that so?_ he said.__es, he worked as a brakeman on the Schoharie railroad station on Depot Street the winter of 1879, three years after he wrote his famous book,_ Bessie said.__hy would he do that, a famos author?_ Antonio asked.__ self-published author, I should add.

A wise man does not waste so good a commodity as lying for naught.