Quote

The pause - that impressive silence, that eloquent silence, that geometrically progressive silence which often achieves a desired effect where no combination of words, howsoever felicitous, could accomplish it.

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
Achieve
Pauses
Geometrically
Words
Impressive
Felicitous
Often
Progressive
Howsoever
Combination
Accomplish
Achieves
Effect
Eloquent
Effects
Desired
Silence
Pause

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An author values a compliment even when it comes from a source of doubtful competency.
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God rewards gamblers and fools. The crucial thing, when you win, is knowing which you were.
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Every time I read a Jane Austen novel, I feel like a bartender at the gates of heaven.
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Life should begin with age and its privileges and accumulations, and end with youth and its capacity to splendidly enjoy such advantages.
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The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it.
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None but the dead have free speech.
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To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct.
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I wrote 'Tom Sawyer' and 'Huck Finn' for adults exclusively, and it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean.
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We had an abundance of mangoes, papaias and bananas here, but the pride of the islands, the most delicious fruit known to men, cherimoya, was not in season. It has a soft pulp, like a pawpaw, and is eaten with a spoon.
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There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.
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Experience, the only logic sure to convince a diseased imagination and restore it to rugged health.
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Where a blood relation sobs, an intimate friend should choke up, a distant acquaintance should sigh, a stranger should merely fumble sympathetically with his handkerchief.
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Go to bed early, get up early-this is wise.
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Everybody lies...every day, every hour, awake, asleep, in his dreams, in his joy, in his mourning. If he keeps his tongue still his hands, his feet, his eyes, his attitude will convey deception.
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I think that the reason why we Americans seem to be so addicted to trying to get rich suddenly is merely because the opportunity to make promising efforts in that direction has offered itself to us with a frequency out of all proportion to the European experience.
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In the ancient city of London, on a certain autumn day in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, a boy was born to a poor family of the name of Canty, who did not want him.
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[On Dutch flat poetry]: It is too smooth and blubbery it reads like butter-milk gurgling from a jug.
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Shut the door not that it lets in the cold but that it lets out the coziness.
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