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To me [Edgar Allen Poe's] prose is unreadable—like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.

Mark Twain

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Mark Twain
Age: 74 †
Born: 1835
Born: November 30
Died: 1910
Died: April 21
Aphorist
Author
Autobiographer
Humorist
Journalist
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Teacher
Florida
Missouri
Samuel Langhorne Clemens
Samuel L. Clemens
Samuel Clemens
Salary
Impossible
Jane
Dies
Prose
Read
Entirely
Natural
Pity
Unreadable
Death
Allowed
Edgar
Seems
Difference
Austin
Great
Allen
Like
Differences

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God created war so that Americans would learn geography.
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If I had more time, I would have written less.
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Doesn't make any difference who we are or what we are, there's always somebody to look down on.
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The government is merely a servant―merely a temporary servant it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.
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There is no family in America without a clock, and consequently there is no fair pretext for the usual Sunday medley of dreadful sounds that issues from our steeples.
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Choosing not to read is like closing an open door to paradise
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I would like to live in Manchester, England. The transition between Manchester and death would be unnoticeable.
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Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government when it deserves it.
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A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thing book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.
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There are no people who are quite so vulgar as the over-refined.
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The common eye sees only the outside of things, and judges by that, but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and the soul, finding there capacities which the outside didn't indicate or promise, and which the other kind of eye couldn't detect.
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Ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense and pitiful chuckle headedness - and an almost pathetic unconsciousness of it all, that is what I was at nineteen and twenty.
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Shall we go on conferring our Civilization upon the peoples that sit in darkness, or shall we give those poor things a rest?
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One learns peoples through the heart, not the eyes or the intellect.
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A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read.
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...nothing so liberalizes a man and expands the kindly instincts that nature put in him as travel and contact with many kinds of people.
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It has been said that a Scotchman has not seen the world until he has seen Edinburgh and I think that I may say that an American has not seen the United States until he has seen Mardi Gras in New Orleans.
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The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French. The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the tellingthe comic and the witty story upon the matter.
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Love is not a product of reasonings and statistics. It just comes-none knows whence-and cannot explain itself.
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Do something everyday that you don't want to do.
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