Mark Twain
Books and Quotes Collection
A New Crime
1870
About ten o'clock a horse and wagon was descried making a slow approach to the camp over the prairie. […] When the conveyance at length drew up to Mr. Thompson's door, the gentleman descended with great deliberation, straightened himself up, rubbed his hands, and beaming satisfaction from every part of his radiant frame, advanced to the group that was gathered to welcome him, and which had saluted him by name as soon as he came within hearing.
And she managed to keep the good news to herself, though it would seem that the most careless observer might have seen by her springing step and her radiant countenance that some fine piece of good fortune had descended upon her.
They came over to Massachusetts Bay in another vessel, and thus escaped the onus of that brevet nobility under which the successors of the Mayflower Pilgrims had descended.
“[…] I always liked you Joe, and stood up for you, too. Don’t you remember? You won’t tell, will you Joe?” And the poor creature dropped on his knees before the stolid murderer, and clasped his appealing hands. / “No, you’ve always been fair and square with me, Muff Potter, and I won’t go back on you.—There, now, that’s as fair as a man can say.”
When the ferry-boat with her wild freight pushed into the stream, nobody cared sixpence for the wasted time but the captain of the craft.
Sometime I've set right down and eat WITH him. But you needn't tell that. A body's got to do things when he's awful hungry he wouldn't want to do as a steady thing.
One (ant) struggled manfully by with a dead spider five times as big as itself in its arms.
A Tramp Abroad
1880
She came at night, and in a storm, with only two attendants, and stood before a peasant’s hut, tired, bedraggled, soaked with rain, “the red print of her lost crown still girdling her brow,” and implored admittance—and was refused!
A few days before, the adulations and applauses of a nation were sounding in her [Marie Louise, Duchess of Parma's] ears, and now she was come to this!
Toward morning, while the old man sat exhausted and asleep in his chair where he had been sitting before his books as one who watches by his beloved dead and prints the features on his memory for a solace in the aftertime of empty desolation, his daughter sprang into the room and gently woke him, saying-- "My presentiment was true!
He also took that old lawyer out of prison and remitted his fine.
Three shillings and eightpence, your worship—I could not abate a penny and set forth the value honestly.
If that I could but clothe me in raiment like to thine, and strip my feet, and revel in the mud once, just once, with none to rebuke me or forbid, meseemeth I could forego the crown!
When a child or a servant buys something in a shop – or even the mayor or governor, for aught I know – he finishes the operation by saying, – 'Give me something for lagniappe.' The shopman always responds; gives the child a bit of liquorice-root; gives the servant a cheap cigar or a spool of thread, gives the governor – I don't know what he gives the governor; support, likely.
When one makes his first voyage in a ship, it is an experience which multitudinously bristles with striking novelties; novelties which are in such sharp contrast with all this person’s former experiences that they take a seemingly deathless grip upon his imagination and memory.
Pudd'nhead Wilson
1894
He dropped gradually back into his old frivolous and easy-going ways and conditions of feeling and manner of speech, and no familiar of his could have detected anything in him that differentiated him from the weak and careless Tom of other days.
[…] the necessity of recognizing this relation outwardly and of perfecting herself in the forms required to express the recognition, had moved her to such diligence and faithfulness in practicing these forms that this exercise soon concreted itself into habit; it became automatic and unconscious; then a natural result followed: […]
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear.
"He's a good fellow, anyway, if he is a teetotaler!" "Drink his health!" "Give him a rouser, and no heeltaps!"