Still Not Original Content
Quotes from Sid Fleischman's biography: The Trouble Begins at 8: A Life of Mark Twain in the Wild, Wild West.
Joy was not the raw material of humor, Twain was to discover. The dark source was sorrow.
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Learning to read was a momentous event in Sam's life. It would soon enable him to breach the borders of Hannibal and to shake hands with the world at large. He mastered the printed page in lightning storms of boyish curiousity. With a memory well stocked with flypaper, he could reel off whole pages from tales of adventure. He could spell almost as well as the dictionary and triumphantly walked away with all the school spelling prizes. Words were a conjuration, and their charms had begun to bewitch him.
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Clemens reacted with dismay at the gross humbugability of his fellow man. This judgment would agitate his sensibilities until he petrified into a public scold. So ruffled did he become at the human gift for homespun ignorance and hypocrisy, for greed and crackpot bigotry, that he would become a one-man firing squad.
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As he himself wrote, "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."
posted by Degolar @ 10:36 AM
1 Comments:
I really enjoy Sid Fleishman's writing. He also wrote an excellent book about Houdini, enhanced by the fact that he knew Houdini's wife in her later years.
JK
Word: subsal
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