Twain Quotes

1. "The half-moon westers low, my love,And the wind brings up the rain;And wide apart lie we, my love,And seas between the twain.I know not if it rains, my love, In the land where you do lie;And oh, so sound you sleep, my love,You know no more than I."
Author: A.E. Housman

2. "I read everything I could find in English - Twain, Henry James, Hemingway, really everything. And then after a while I started writing shorter pieces in English, and one of them got published in a literary magazine and that's how it got started. After that, graduate school didn't seem very important."
Author: Aleksandar Hemon

3. "I'm writing my next book under a pseudonym. It will be Mark Twain's best young adult romance."
Author: Benson Bruno

4. "Courage is not absence of fear; it is control of fear, mastery of fear." —MARK TWAIN"
Author: Brian Tracy

5. "Mark Twain's Roughing It is a book that many people don't know about, but I highly recommend to anybody at any age."
Author: Chuck Jones

6. "LEARN FROM THE MASTERS: Mark Twain once said, "Show, don't tell." This is an incredibly important lesson for writers to remember; never get such a giant head that you feel entitled to throw around obscure phrases like "Show, don't tell." Thanks for nothing, Mr. Cryptic."
Author: Colin Nissan

7. "My office walls are covered with autographs of famous writers - it's what my children call my 'dead author wall.' I have signatures from Mark Twain, Earnest Hemingway, Jack London, Harriett Beecher Stowe, Pearl Buck, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to name a few."
Author: Debbie Macomber

8. "For me, all writing -- storytelling and style -- gets back to the Bible, Twain and Hemingway, and not in that order."
Author: Dennis R. Miller

9. "Bob Hope, like Mark Twain, had a sense of humor that was uniquely American, and like Twain, we'll likely not see another like him."
Author: Dick Van Dyke

10. "Should a writer have a social purpose? Any honest writer is bound to become a critic of the society he lives in, and sometimes, like Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut or Leo Tolstoy or Francois Rabelais, a very harsh critic indeed. The others are sycophants, courtiers, servitors, entertainers. Shakespeare was a sychophant; however, he was and is also a very good poet, and so we continue to read him."
Author: Edward Abbey

11. "So I "feckup" words sometimes...I write in a colloquial style, so did Mark Twain. Seems I'm in pretty good company."
Author: Emma Paul

12. "Shania Twain brought a whole other fan base to country music with her sound, the way the videos were produced."
Author: Faith Hill

13. "Where lies the power, there let the blame lie too."Nay, power is relative; you cannot frightThe coming pest with border fortresses,Or catch your carp with subtle argument.All force is twain in one: cause is not causeUnless effect be there; and action's selfMust needs contain a passive. So commandExists but with obedience."
Author: George Eliot

14. "Mark Twain cannot be defined."
Author: Hal Holbrook

15. "You can go into Mark Twain's material and prove anything you want. He was against war. He was for war. He was against rich people and he was for them. He was a kaleidoscope."
Author: Hal Holbrook

16. "Tacked above my desk are photos of artists I admire - Hopper, Sargent, Twain - and postcards from beloved bookstores where I've spent all my time and money - Tattered Cover, Elliot Bay, Harvard Bookstore."
Author: J. R. Moehringer

17. "Is a picture really worth a thousand words? What thousand words? A thousand words from a lunatic, or a thousand words from Nietzsche? Actually, Nietzsche was a lunatic, but you see my point. What about a thousand words from a rambler vs. 500 words from Mark Twain? He could say the same thing quicker and with more force than almost any other writer. One thousand words from Ginsberg are not even worth one from Wilde. It's wild to declare the equivalency of any picture with any army of 1,000 words. Words from a writer like Wordsworth make you appreciate what words are worth."
Author: Jarod Kintz

18. "America's Facebook generation shows a submission to standardization that I haven't seen before. The American adventure has always been about people forgetting their former selves - Samuel Clemens became Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac went on the road. If they had a Facebook page, they wouldn't have been able to forget their former selves."
Author: Jaron Lanier

19. "Seriously, our nation is never going to be on the same page on issues like gun control, welfare, the economy, the environment, etc. I doubt we'll ever come to terms on tastes great or less filling and hybrids versus Hummers, and there will always be Yankees fans and Red Sox fans, and never the 'twain shall meet. Fortunately, all it takes for us to be of one mind is some buttercream frosting."
Author: Jen Lancaster

20. "And I knew in my bones that Emily Dickinson wouldn't have written even one poem if she'd had two howling babies, a husband bent on jamming another one into her, a house to run, a garden to tend, three cows to milk, twenty chickens to feed, and four hired hands to cook for. I knew then why they didn't marry. Emily and Jane and Louisa. I knew and it scared me. I also knew what being lonely was and I didn't want to be lonely my whole life. I didn't want to give up on my words. I didn't want to choose one over the other. Mark Twain didn't have to. Charles Dickens didn't."
Author: Jennifer Donnelly

21. "...why is my cat a Muse? the cat has the rare grace of never saying a word too much? Mark Twain ...that's why ..."
Author: John Geddes

22. "It smells terrible in here.'Well, what do you expect? The human body, when confined, produces certain odors which we tend to forget in this age of deodorants and other perversions. Actually, I find the atmosphere of this room rather comforting. Schiller needed the scent of apples rotting in his desk in order to write. I, too, have my needs. You may remember that Mark Twain preferred to lie supinely in bed while composing those rather dated and boring efforts which contemporary scholars try to prove meaningful. Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate."
Author: John Kennedy Toole

23. "I think it was Mark Twain who said, "Get your facts straight, and then you can distort them as much as you like."
Author: Josh Lanyon

24. "We are so identified with who we think we are that it limits how we can be, determines how we live, and conditions how we react. As Mark Twain said, "It's not what we don't know that gets us in trouble, but what we are sure we know."
Author: Lama Surya Das

25. "...as long as we have the choice to read what we want, I suspect Twain and Homer and the rest will always be with us. The stoutest old writers ebb and flow in popularity; tastes and political correctness and educational trends also ebb and flow, and we have a tendency to embrace the short view because it makes better news stories. So the joy of literature may not be at a high water mark right now, and yet you can walk into the Target store of your choice and pick up Catcher in the Rye. Beauty floats, I guess, along with sorrow and hope. (http://www.wab.org/events/allofroches...)"
Author: Leif Enger

26. "From authors whom I read more than once I learn to value the weight of words and to delight in their meter and cadence -- in Gibbon's polyphonic counterpoint and Guedalla's command of the subjunctive, in Mailer's hyperbole and Dillard's similes, in Twain's invectives and burlesques with which he set the torch of his ferocious wit to the hospitality tents of the world's colossal humbug . . . I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words."- from Harper's Notebook, November 2010"
Author: Lewis H. Lapham

27. "Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, and so many others were my dearest friends and greatest teachers."
Author: Lloyd Alexander

28. "I'm a big John Steinbeck fan. Cormac McCarthy. I've always loved the stories of regular people. Mark Twain, too. When you look back at some of the epic writers of our country's history, very rarely do you find upper-class royalty. We seem to delve into the struggle of life and the labor of life much more frequently."
Author: Lucas Neff

29. "Mark Twain dijo: "Los dos días más importantes de tu vida es el día en que naces y el día en que descubres por qué."No recuerdo el día en que nací, pero recuerdo el día en que descubrí por qué.Su nombre era Deuce.Él era mi "por qué"Y esta es nuestra historia.No es una bonita.Algunas partes de ella son francamente feas.Pero es nuestra.Y porque creo que todo pasa por una razón, no cambiaría nada."
Author: Madeline Sheehan

30. "You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly—Tom's Aunt Polly, she is—and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before."
Author: Mark Twain

31. "Adam is fading out. It is on account of Darwin and that crowd. I can see that he is not going to last much longer. There's a plenty of signs. He is getting belittled to a germ—a little bit of a speck that you can't see without a microscope powerful enough to raise a gnat to the size of a church.('The Refuge of the Derelicts' collected in Mark Twain and John Sutton Tuckey, The Devil's Race-Track: Mark Twain's Great Dark Writings (1980), 340-41. - 1980)"
Author: Mark Twain

32. "A hypocritical businessman, whose fortune had been the misfortune of many others, told Mark Twain piously, "Before I die I intend to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. I want to climb to the top of Mount Sinai and read the Ten Commandments aloud." "I have a better idea," suggested Twain. "Why don't you stay right at home in Boston and keep them?"
Author: Mark Twain

33. "Dance like no one's watching, live every day like it's your last and love like you've never been hurt. Mark Twain"
Author: Mark Twain

34. "The stranger's first feeling, when suddenly confronted by that towering and awful apparition wrapped in its shroud of snow, is breath-taking astonishment. It is as if heaven's gates had swung open and exposed the throne. (Twain on seeing the Jungfrau.)"
Author: Mark Twain

35. "ALL of Mark Twain's! Just go to his quote page - https://www.goodreads.com/author/quot..."
Author: Mark Twain

36. "Mark Twain describes how his friend Ralph Keeler introduced him at the start of a lecture: " 'I don't know anything about this man. At least I know only two things; one is, he hasn't been in the penitentiary, and the other is (after a pause, and almost sadly), I don't know why."
Author: Mark Twain

37. "Mark Twain, cynical about so much else, has a particular reverence in the Holy Land for "sitting where a god has stood". What flabbergasted him was that his traveling companions would be in such a sanctified environment and winter what they saw according to other writers or their denominational background instead their own experience with the holy."
Author: Mark Twain

38. "Sir Thomas More was a victim of injustice and irony. Generously and meekly, just as he was about to be martyred, he said: Paul . . . was present, and consented to the death of St. Stephen, and kept their clothes that stoned him to death, and yet be they [Stephen and Paul] now both twain Holy Saints in heaven, and shall continue there friends for ever, so I verily trust and . . . pray, that though your lordships have now here in earth been judges to my condemnation, we may yet hereafter in heaven merrily all meet together, to our everlasting salvation."
Author: Neal A. Maxwell

39. "The power of literature, I've always thought, lies in how willful the act of making it is. As such, I've never bought into the idea that the writer requires any special ritual in order to write. If need be, I could write almost anywhere, as easily in an ashram as in a crowded cafe, or so I've always insisted when asked whether I write with a pen or a computer, at morning or night, alone or surrounded, in a saddle like Goethe, standing like Hemingway, lying down like Twain, and so on, as if there were a secret to it all that might spring the lock of the safe housing the novel, fully formed and ready for publication, apparently suspended in each of us."
Author: Nicole Krauss

40. "Whether will the twain will ye that I release unto you?"
Author: Pontius Pilate

41. "{Twain on the sudden death of his good friend, Robert Ingersoll}Except for my daughters, I have not grieved for any death as I have grieved for his. His was a great and beautiful spirit, he was a man – all man, from his crown to his footsoles. My reverence for him was deep and genuine."
Author: Robert Ingersoll

42. "I've been enjoying 'Life on the Mississippi' by Mark Twain that I picked up at the airport randomly. It's very witty and interesting to read about his time as a steamboat pilot."
Author: Roman Coppola

43. "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."
Author: Russell Banks

44. "To love in any way is to be like a child—it means to be vulnerable, to be wide-eyed, to be selfless. There is no such thing as free love; love is the mostcostly expression in the world. To love romantically is to give ofoneself fully and completely, a merging and meshing of souls sothat the twain become a unity. It is to allow the sense of wonderto fully enrapture."
Author: Ted Dekker

45. "If you hold a cat by the tail, you learn things you can't learn any other way.--Mark Twain"
Author: Tony Paul De Vissage

46. "Mark Twain had a way of telling stories that shifts your consciousness away from labels."
Author: Val Kilmer

47. "Mark Twain is as big as America. He really is."
Author: Val Kilmer

48. "LET us twain walk aside from the rest; Now we are together privately, do you discard ceremony, Come! vouchsafe to me what has yet been vouchsafed to none—Tell me the whole story, Tell me what you would not tell your brother, wife, husband, or physician."
Author: Walt Whitman

49. "Oh east is east, and west is west,And never the twain shall meet--Until they come to the end of the earth,To Santa Claus' retreat."
Author: Walter R. Brooks

50. "OTHELLO [Rising.]                         O, she was foul!— I scarce did know you, uncle; there lies your niece, Whose breath, indeed, these hands have newly stopp'd: I know this act shows horrible and grim. GRATIANO Poor Desdemona! I am glad thy father's dead: Thy match was mortal to him, and pure grief Shore his old thread in twain: did he live now, This sight would make him do a desperate turn, Yea, curse his better angel from his side, And fall to reprobance. OTHELLO 'Tis pitiful; but yet Iago knows That she with Cassio hath"
Author: William Shakespeare

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