Mark Twain - Life on the Mississippi (1883)

19 Sourced Quotes

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In the South, the war is what A.D. is elsewhere; they date from it.

Mark Twain
Sometimes, half a dozen figures will reveal, as with a lighting-flash, the importance of a subject which ten thousand labored words with the same purpose in view, had left at last but dim and uncertain.

Mark Twain
Always dress a fact in tights, never in an ulster.

Mark Twain
Pardon, once more; if you are going to load any thing more on to that statement, you want to get a couple of lighters and tow the rest, because it's drawing all the water there is in the river already; stick to facts - just stick to the cold facts.

Mark Twain
True the billiard-tables were of the Old Silurian Period and the cues and balls of the Post-Pliocene; but there was refreshment in this, not discomfort; for there are rest and healing in the contemplation of antiquities.

Mark Twain
I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know.

Mark Twain
The first time I ever saw St. Louis, I could have bought it for six million dollars, and it was the mistake of my life that I did not do it.

Mark Twain
I can picture that old time to myself now, just as it was then: the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer's morning... the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun.

Mark Twain
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Mark Twain
I'm the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam'd by an earthquake.... When I'm playful I use the meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude for a seine, and drag the Atlantic Ocean for whales! I scratch my head with the lightning and purr myself to sleep with the thunder!

Mark Twain
Your true pilot cares nothing about anything on earth but the river, and his pride in his occupation surpasses the pride of kings.

Mark Twain
You take the lies out of him, and he'll shrink to the size of your hat; you take the malice out of him, and he'll disappear.

Mark Twain
Give an Irishman lager for a month, and he's a dead man. An Irishman is lined with copper, and the beer corrodes it. But whiskey polishes the copper and is the saving of him.

Mark Twain
When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have known him before —met him on the river.

Mark Twain
My memory was never loaded with anything but blank cartridges.

Mark Twain
We asked a passenger who belonged there what sort of a place it was. Well, said he, after considering, and with the air of one who wishes to take time and be accurate, It's a hell of a place. A description which was photographic for exactness.

Mark Twain
It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago-she outgrows his prophecies faster than he can make them. She is always a novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time.

Mark Twain
By the Shadow of Death, but he's a lightning pilot!

Mark Twain
There is no architecture in New Orleans, except in the cemeteries.

Mark Twain