Quotes About Twain

No! You mean you're the late CHarlemagne; you must be six or seven hundred years old, at the very least. Trouble has done it, Bilgewater, trouble has done it; trouble has brung these gray hairs and this premature balditude.

and they come without any inherited prejudices in favor of hoary ignorances made sacred by long descent.

The street called Straight is straighter than a corkscrew, but not as straight as a rainbow. St. Luke is careful not to commit himself; he does not say it is the street which is straight, but the "street which is called Straight." It is a fine piece of irony; it is the only facetious remark in the Bible, I believe.

Well: Love and Pain Be kinfolks twain; Yet would, Oh would I could Love again.

Twain's moods changed frequently, and it is unrealistic to saddle him with one dominant emotion during his final years, when he was as likely to assume the part of the joker as that of the angry prophet.

The requiem of the twain was the roar of the breaking waves and the scream of the white birds that circled round the Watter's Mou'.

Proto-postmodernist story of a habitual gambler and his bested frog. The plot isn't much, but it's worth reading because of the fun Twain has with narrative authority. (In reading Twain, I often suspect he is having more fun than I am.)

His arrival at the Alamo is one of history's great juxtapositional flukes, as if Teddy Roosevelt or Mark Twain had darted onto the Titanic at the last minute. The man and the place had almost nothing to do with each other, yet their stories would now be forever intertwined.

His meanings are quite different from those of Twain. Together the river and the bridge constitute an image of total connection.

Every Shania Twain interview ends with someone asking, 'Which Beatles album have you always wanted to cover, given the chance?'

But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.

Twain is my keystone. He reminds me of my people because that's the way they told stories.

As one of the first editors at 'Outside' magazine in 1975, it was my contention that most American writing going back to James Fennimore Cooper and then through Twain up to Hemingway had been outdoor writing. At that time, adventure writing meant stuff like 'Saga' or 'Argosy.' 'Death Race with the Jungle Leper Army!' That kind of thing.

We all like all kinds of music. Like, I love Shania Twain.

'White Christmas' is the best holiday song and I've grown up listening to Michael Buble's version with Shania Twain.

I'm not going to lay down in words the lure of this place. Every great writer in the land, from Faulkner to Twain to Rice to Ford, has tried to do it and fallen short. It is impossible to capture the essence, tolerance, and spirit of south Louisiana in words and to try is to roll down a road of clichés, bouncing over beignets and beads and brass bands and it just is what it is. It is home.

The great nineteenth-century writers — Hawthorne and Melville, Thoreau and Emerson, Twain and James — were skeptics, transcendentalists, and humanists, and not even God knows what Emily Dickinson was.

I put in these parentheses to signify a complicated wink — you understand?

Twain had found Palestine to be very tiny, writing that he "could not conceive of a small country having so large a history.

How true a twain Seemeth this concordant one! Love hath reason, Reason none, If what parts, can so remain.

Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? and ain't that a big enough majority in any town?

(Twain on Cain): it was his misfortune to live in a dark age that knew not the beneficent Insanity Plea.

Caesar is only mentioned once in the gospels, and there Jesus says that there's a clear division between God and Caesar, a split of church and state, so that never the twain shall meet. Well, not so fast. We'll get to that. It sounds suspiciously modern. Did Jesus really anticipate post-Enlightenment Western ideology so exactly?