Word: twains
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...force-the one which can't bear to be outside the pale, can't bear to be in disfavor, can't endure the averted face and the cold shoulder, wants to stand well with his friends, wants to be smiled upon, wants to be welcome.-Mark Twain...
...band, Crazy Horse, is full of brash challenge, like the best punk. Even his acoustic songs-sometimes witty, often wildly romantic-have the kind of recklessness and daring that punk stands for but only fitfully delivers. There are other specters and influences hovering around this record, from Mark Twain to Sam Peckinpah to Johnny Rotten, and it is one mark of Young's achievement that he can sit them all down around the fire and make them seem like brothers...
Besides being given to wiping away their past, many people, particularly writers, are prone to fabrication. Mark Twain could not resist a good story about himself, even if he had to make it up; William Butler Yeats dressed in colorful myths; and George Bernard Shaw found simple facts insufficiently expressive...
...1860s Mark Twain wrote a humorous column for the Territorial Enterprise of Virginia City, Nev., about a horse that tried to eat a boy on his way to Sunday school ("The boy got loose, you know, but that old hoss got his bible and some tracts ..."). Twain overheard somebody laughing at it and decided to write more columns, all just as hilarious as the first...
Barbara Tuchman's lament is a well-intentioned reminder of our reluctance to honor our artists and thinkers. But the comparison is unfortunate. Twain was a humorist and satirist who was as much taken in by the Gilded Age as he was critical of it; Hugo was a lyric poet and epic novelist-and, what's more, a political hero. His exile was a symbol of opposition to tyranny...