Quote

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.

Mark Twain

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Find
Access
Finn
Mind
Adults
Distressed
Always
Clean
Washed
Never
Girls
Exclusively
Youth
Toms
Boys
Censorship
Huck
Becomes
Allowed
Soiled
Girl
Wrote
Sawyer

More quotes by Mark Twain

Image
I am losing enough sleep to supply a worn-out army.
Mark Twain
Image
Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights...sexual intercourse!...His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values.
Mark Twain
Image
Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it -- namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.
Mark Twain
Image
In religion and politics, people's belief's and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination
Mark Twain
Image
When someone dies, it is like when your house burns down it isn't for years that you realize the full extent of your loss.
Mark Twain
Image
We never knew an ignorant person yet but was prejudiced.
Mark Twain
Image
How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and [how] hard it is to undo that work again!
Mark Twain
Image
A man who carries a cat by the tail is getting experience that will always be helpful. He isn't likely to grow dim or doubtful. Chances are, he isn't likely to carry the cat that way again, either. But if he wants to, I say let him!
Mark Twain
Image
The older I get, the more clearly I remember things that never happened.
Mark Twain
Image
Education is what you must acquire without any interference from your schooling.
Mark Twain
Image
I have always been rather better treated in San Francisco than I actually deserved.
Mark Twain
Image
I should be sorry to think it was the publishers themselves they got up this entire little flutter to enable them to unload a book that was taking too much room in their cellars, but you can never tell what a publisher will do. I have been one myself.
Mark Twain
Image
Never argue with people who buy ink by the gallon.
Mark Twain
Image
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
Image
Who knows, he may grow up to be President someday, unless they hang him first! Aunt Polly about Tom Sawyer
Mark Twain
Image
One may make their house a palace of sham, or they can make it a home, a refuge.
Mark Twain
Image
A dollar picked up in the road is more satisfaction to you than the ninety-and -nine which you had to work for, and money won at faro or in stock snuggles into your heart in the same way.
Mark Twain
Image
I went to the circus, and loafed around the back side till the watchman went by, and then dived in under the tent. I had my twenty-dollar gold piece and some other money, but I reckoned I better save it.... I ain't opposed to spending money on circuses, when there ain't no other way, but there ain't no use in wasting it on them.
Mark Twain
Image
But it was ever thus, all through my life: whenever I have diverged from custom and principle and uttered a truth, the rule has been that the hearer hadn't strength of mind enough to believe it.
Mark Twain
Image
Never be haughty to the humble, never be humble to the haughty.
Mark Twain