From Mark Twain:
You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination.
Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you; that is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.
My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
Definitely food for thought. However, I take odds against him regarding Austen. Twain was an excellent character-portrayer in his own right, but so was Austen in her context. She may've catered too much to a certain audience, and she may've succombed to the literary morays of her society. Twain and Dickens and Hawthorne and a few others were very accomplished in the skills of perceiving and portraying human nature, but nonetheless there were/are yet many less-adept authors who could stand to learn from Austen's character sketches, regardless of her flaws.
Now...if he had been running his steamboat over the works of Janette Oke, maybe I could've agreed with more gumption. (Oh, but I'll be good and stop there.)
Posted by: joydriven at June 3, 2003 12:38 AM