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Life on the Mississippi quotes
12 quotes from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain. Source: Project Gutenberg e-text #245 (public domain in the USA), the text this site’s reader shows. Each quote is copied exactly from that text and links to its passage in the reader; when this page was built, every quote was checked word for word against the reader’s text.
The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book--a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.
In the South, the war is what A.D. is elsewhere: they date from it.
One who knows the Mississippi will promptly aver--not aloud, but to himself--that ten thousand River Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, Go here, or Go there, and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh at.
The world and the books are so accustomed to use, and over-use, the word 'new' in connection with our country, that we early get and permanently retain the impression that there is nothing old about it.
When a circus came and went, it left us all burning to become clowns; the first negro minstrel show that came to our section left us all suffering to try that kind of life; now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
And, mind you, emotions are among the toughest things in the world to manufacture out of whole cloth; it is easier to manufacture seven facts than one emotion.
It always happens that when a man seizes upon a neglected and important idea, people inflamed with the same notion crop up all around.
Nobody could infer the master-mind in the top of that edifice from the edifice itself.
On this up trip I saw a little towhead (infant island) half a mile long, which had been formed during the past nineteen years.
writers of all kinds are manacled servants of the public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we 'modify' before we print.
There's only one way to be a pilot, and that is to get this entire river by heart. You have to know it just like A B C.'