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The Complete Works of Mark Twain: All 13 Novels, Short Stories, Poetry and Essays

Book by Mark Twain · 9 quotes · Men, Ifs, People

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The Complete Works of Mark Twain: All 13 Novels, Short Stories, Poetry and Essays Quotes

“You try to tell me anything about the newspaper business! Sir, I have been through it from Alpha to Omaha, and I tell you that the less a man knows the bigger the noise he makes and the higher the salary he commands.”

KnowsMenTryingHas BeensHigherBiggerNewspapersNoiseCommandSalaryAlphasOmaha
Book:The Complete Works of Mark Twain: All 13 Novels, Short Stories, Poetry and Essays
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“A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results.”

PeopleKnowsMenWritingTryingMindTwoIdeasFactsStoriesBornInterestingResultsNovelClearIncidentsPlungeNovel WritingTroublesomeLocality
Book:The Complete Works of Mark Twain: All 13 Novels, Short Stories, Poetry and Essays
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“An injurious truth has no merit over an injurious lie. Neither should ever be uttered. The man who speaks an injurious truth, lest his soul be not saved if he do otherwise, should reflect that that sort of a soul is not strictly worth saving.”

IfsMenShouldSoulTruthLyingSpeakHe ManSavedSavingMerit
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“As I have said before, I never had any large respect for good spelling. That is my feeling yet. Before the spelling-book came with its arbitrary forms, men unconsciously revealed shades of their characters, and also added enlightening shades of expression to what they wrote by their spelling, and so it is possible that the spelling-book has been a doubtful benevolence to us.”

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Book:The Complete Works of Mark Twain: All 13 Novels, Short Stories, Poetry and Essays
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“Next you'd see a raft sliding by, away off yonder, and maybe a galoot on it chopping. . . you'd see the ax flash and come down-you don't hear nothing; you see the ax go up again, and by the time it's above the man's head then you hear the k'chunk!-it had took all that time to come over the water.”

MenScienceNextWaterMathPhysicsFlashChunksChopping
Book:The Complete Works of Mark Twain: All 13 Novels, Short Stories, Poetry and Essays
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