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Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.

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
Good
Would
Pirates
Pirate
Sailing
Permit
Lived
Hope

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I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
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For England must not fall: it would mean an inundation of Russian & German political degradations which would envelop the globe & steep it in a sort of Middle-Age night & slaverly which would last till Christ comes again - which I hope he will not do he made trouble enough before.
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Alas! those good old days are gone, when a murderer could wipe the stain from his name and soothe his trouble to sleep simply by getting out his blocks and mortar and building an addition to a church.
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Surely the test of a novel's characters is that you feel a strong interest in them and their affairs the good to be successful, the bad to suffer failure. Well, in John Ward, you feel no divided interest, no discriminating interest you want them all to land in hell together, and right away.
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In my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.
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I have too much respect for the truth to drag it out on every trifling occasion.
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The difference between fiction and nonfiction is that fiction must be absolutely believable.
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