Quotes & Sayings About Huck

Ll the merry little elves can go hang themselves
My faith is as cold as can be
I'm stacked high to the roof, and I'm not without proof
If you don't believe me, come see.
You think i'm blue I think so too
In my words you'll find no guile
The game's gotten old The deck's gone cold
And i'm gonna have to put you down for a while
The game's gotten old The deck's gone cold
I'm gonna have to put you down for a while
-Bob Dylan, Huck's Tune — Bob Dylan

And she kissed me on the lips out of nowhere during recess one day while I was trying to read Huck Finn in the sandbox, and that was my first kiss, and later that day she dumped me because boys were gross. — John Green

The raft was seized, with a noise like needles knitting, and we were hemmed in for winter -- river and the old channel's oxbow lake having frozen solid. By now, we guessed we were not two ordinary river travelers...it must have been the river that was extraordinary: a marvel that protected us by the same mysterious action that had given a common horse wings and changed a woman into a laurel tree. — Norman Lock

Giving jazz the Congressional seal of approval is a little like making Huck Finn an honorary Boy Scout. — Melvin Maddocks

Siddhartha wants liberation, Dante wants Beatrice, Frodo wants to get to Mount Doom - we all want something. Quest is elemental to the human experience. All road narratives are to some extent built on quest. If you're a woman, though, this fundamental possibility of quest is denied. You can't go anywhere if you can't step out onto a road ...
... (T)here is no female counterpart in our culture to Ishmael or Huck Finn. There is no Dean Moriarty, Sal, or even a Fuckhead. It sounds like a doctoral crisis, but it's not. As a fifteen-year-old hitchhiker, my survival depended upon other people's ability to envision a possible future for me. Without a Melvillean or Kerouacian framework, or at least some kind of narrative to spell out a potential beyond death, none of my resourcefulness or curiosity was recognizable, and therefore I was unrecognizable. — Vanessa Veselka

They don't like my kind in here," Arthur said to CJ...I own a shop on The Aisle. Huck there" - Arthur nodded at the barkeep - "isn't a fan of the wedding industry."
"Why not?"
"Guy's been divorced three times and has a bar called Suckers in the most married-est town on earth. He caters to the underground wedding haters and single groomsmen. — Jamie Farrell

Steal a chicken if you get a chance, Huck, because if you don't want it, someone else does and a good deed ain't never forgotten. — Mark Twain

Say - what is dead cats good for, Huck?" "Good for? Cure warts with. — Mark Twain

It don't make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person's conscience ain't got no sense, and just goes for him anyway. — Mark Twain

If Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer were alive today, we'd say they had ADD or a conduct disorder. They [boys] are who they are, and we need to love them for who they are. Let's not try to rewire them. — Michael Gurian

With George Clooney, the distinctive quality is a unique kind of American phoniness - charming because it's aware of itself as phony. It's as old as old Huck Finn, but, in our age, it has migrated from the fringes to the center. — Rich Cohen

I've grown up well, partly because there weren't great girls' literature - Nancy Drew, maybe - but there weren't things. So there was Huck Finn and "Spin And Marty." The boys characters were interesting and you lived through them when you're watching it. — Meryl Streep

What we got is NOW, Huck, and now is forever. Until it ain't. So, you can't worry over nothing except putting off the end a your story as long as you can, and finishing it with a bang. — Robert Coover

At one point, I was seriously considering playing Huck Finn in a production in Northern Maine in the dead of winter. — David Walton

To ennoble is to diminish by robbing people of their complexity, their completeness, of their humanity, which is always clouded by what gets stirred up at the bottom. — Norman Lock

You can't pray a lie" Huck Finn — Mark Twain

[On Jimmy Carter] Huck Finn. Loss of identity drives people to nostalgia. Electronic man has no physical body, so he puts nostalgia in its place. — Marshall McLuhan

I set down in a chair by the window and tried to think of something cheerful, but it warn't no use. I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. — Mark Twain

It ain't no use to try to learn you nothing, Huck. — Mark Twain

I insist on caprice as a necessary countermeasure to slavery. Otherwise, my own dictatorial mind must take -- unknown to me -- its instructions from a mastermind. — Norman Lock

It was very interesting time to be in England. Even at that point [John] Lennon and [Paul] McCartney influenced my writing. I thought, "maybe there is a huck or two in here I haven't thought of". — Gordon Lightfoot

Mark Twain didn't psychoanalyze Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer. Dickens didn't put Oliver Twist on the couch because he was hungry! Good copy comes out of people, Johnny, not out of a lot of explanatory medical terms. — Samuel Fuller

Huck was always willing to take a hand in any enterprise that offered entertainment and required no capital, for he had a troublesome super-abundance of that sort of time which is not money. — Mark Twain

He had a dream and it shot him. — Mark Twain

The critique of social inequality, which is very much a part of my story, came about naturally from my recollection of Huck and Tom and the controversy surrounding [Mark] Twain's use of them and from my own passionate interest in civil rights, animal rights, and the right of Earth to survive humankind's reprehensible neglect of its stewardship. — Norman Lock

Tom Sawyer said I was a numskull. — Mark Twain

I reck'n I knows what I knows. — Mark Twain

I read Norman Lock's The Boy in His Winter with delight and amazement. Styled in the vernacular of a rapidly changing America, it stays true to the themes of Mark Twain's original: class relations, race and slavery, childhood innocence, moral hypocrisy - and, of course, the stark beauty and unforgiving nature of America's greatest river. I finished this absolutely elegant narrative feeling that Huck Finn has never been more alive. — David Oshinsky

It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened. — Mark Twain

I believe that it is only through empathy, that the pain experienced by an Algerian woman, a North Korean dissident, a Rwandan child or an Iraqi prisoner, becomes real to me and not just passing news. And it is at times like this when I ask myself, am I prepared - like Huck Finn - to give up Sunday school heaven for the kind of hell that Huck chose? — Azar Nafisi

This ain't no thirty-seven year job, this is a thirty-eight year job, Tom Sawyer. — Mark Twain

Huck is initially taken in by these two rogues, in the same manner that many Americans have been conned by progressives. The progressive scams, however, have endured for a while. Huck, however, is a quick learner. He soon figures out what his high-titled compatriots are up to. "It didn't take me long to make up my mind that these liars warn't no kings or dukes either, but just low-down humbugs and frauds."10 Assessing the pitches that progressives have been putting forward for at least the past seven years, from the reparations pitch to the inequality pitch to the "you didn't build that" pitch to the Lucky Luciano pitch, it is difficult to come to a different conclusion. — Dinesh D'Souza

Everyone ate as a group, and a huge cauldron of dumpster-dived gruel bubbled over a campfire, tended by a grubby-handed group of chefs dicing potatoes and onions on a piece of cardboard on the ground. Huck [Finn] may have been right that a 'barrel of odds and ends' where the 'juice kind of swaps around' makes for better victuals, but it occurred to me that the revolution may well get dysentery. — Matthew Power

Courts musn't interfere and separate families if they could help it. Said he'd druther not take a child away from its father. — Mark Twain

When I heard 'Moon River', at first I thought it was just a nice song, but then I started paying attention to the words and realized this song was about Huck Finn. I just love the words, that it's kind of you and me against the world, and we're going to make it together. — Drew Holcomb

We may not realize it, but every point during the passage of our lives is a point of no return -- except for what memory permits. — Norman Lock

The sun was up so high when i waked, that i judged it was after eight o'clock. i laid there in the grass and the cool shade, thinking about things and feeling rested and ruther comfortable and satisfied. i could see the sun out at one or two holes, but mostly it was big trees all about, and gloomy in there amongst them. there was freckled places on the ground where the light sifted down through the leaves, and the freckled places swapped about a little, showing there was a little breeze up there. a couple of squirrels set on a limb and jabbered at me very friendly. — Mark Twain

After a time, it seemed that the world inside the books became my world. So when I thought of my childhood, it was dandelion wine and ice cream on a summer porch, like Ray Bradbury, and catching catfish with Huck Finn. My own memories receded and the book memories became the real memories, far more than the outside, far more even than in here. — Rene Denfeld

{Y}ou make do with what you're given, and I've spent a good many years learning to write fine-sounding sentences so that I can hide behind them. It's the way of the hermit crab, with nothing to recommend it but the pretty shell it annexes for its own. — Norman Lock

It inspired a kind of Huck Finn moment when I decided it was better to risk hell than shrivel in the midst of a toxic Southern Baptist morality. — Kelly J. Cogswell

I reck'n I knows sense when I sees it; en dey ain' no sense in sich doin's as dat. — Mark Twain

Talking of appearances, I would like my future readers to know that the picture of Jim and me that Thomas Hart Benton painted on the wall of the Missouri state capitol bears not the slightest resemblance to either one of us. ... I've never been satisfied with any representation of myself and have seen only one picture of Jim that did him justice. I don't know why this should be, unless it is evidence of a nearly universal prejudice against us, instigated by Sunday school superintendents, Republicans, and bigots. — Norman Lock

This is Huck Finn, a child of mine of shady reputation. Be good to him for his parent's sake. — Mark Twain

One of the problems with putting Huck Finn into a movie or on the stage is, you always make the white people stupid and racist. The point is, they don't know they're racist. — Hal Holbrook

I grew up like Huck Finn, always outdoors, exploring, collecting frogs - there was space everywhere. I want my kids to experience that too. I love being outside. — Josh Duhamel

I would prefer to believe that things possess the power of recall, of recollection. That things are memoirs of the existences that once were theirs, if only we knew how to read them. — Norman Lock

I found no muse on Hyperion during those first years. For many, the expansion of distance because of limited transportation - EMVs were unreliable, skimmers scarce - and the contraction of artificial consciousness due to absence of datasphere, no access to the All Thing, and only one fatline transmitter - all led to a renewal of creative energies, a new realization of what it meant to be human and an artist. Or so I heard. No muse appeared. My verse continued to be technically proficient and dead as Huck Finn's cat. I decided to kill myself. — Dan Simmons

The mob hysteria over pedophiles has reached epidemic proportions and driven parents to panic. Today's Just Williams, today's Huck Finns, today's Swallows and Amazons are deprived of the freedom to roam that was one of the delights of childhood in earlier times (when the actual, as opposed to the perceived, risk of molestation was probably no less). — Richard Dawkins

The description of Huck's father grabbed my full attention, and I glanced up at the book in my teacher's hand as if to double check. My eyes bulged reflexively. Huck's father was an abusive drunk just like mine. The boy was hopeful that a corpse found near the river was actually his dad, but it turned out not to be. It was spooky how high my hopes rose for the boy, and then sank so utterly low when the body was discovered to be a female in disguise. I should've mourned for the woman, but it was the boy I felt bad for. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Haven't you ever harbored the secret thought that somewhere Huck and Jim are - at this instant - poling their raft down some river just beyond our reach, so much more real are they than the shoe clerk who fitted us just a forgotten day ago? — Dan Simmons

Things settled into a lazy pattern. School, chores, and long hours down by the river. Kiernan talked about the books he read sometimes, even loaned me a few. But I liked it better when he read to me or just told me the stories. The words were more real that way, more exciting. Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Ragged Dick, and all the others seemed flat and dull on the page, but Kiernan was good at making them come alive. — Rysa Walker

In a culture that is becoming ever more story-stupid, in which a representative of the Coca-Cola company can, with a straight face, pronounce, as he donates a collection of archival Coca-Cola commercials to the Library of Congress, that 'Coca-Cola has become an integral part of people's lives by helping to tell these stories,' it is perhaps not surprising that people have trouble teaching and receiving a novel as complex and flawed as Huck Finn, but it is even more urgent that we learn to look passionately and technically at stories, if only to protect ourselves from the false and manipulative ones being circulated among us. — George Saunders

Angrily, I concentrated on her flaws, willfully studying the photographs that caught her at awkward ages and less flattering angles - long nose, thin cheeks, her eyes (despite their heartbreaking color) naked-looking with their pale lashes - Huck-Finn plain. Yet all these aspects were - to me - so tender and particular they moved to despair. — Donna Tartt

Confound it, it's foolish, Tom — Mark Twain

Hatred is unattractive, but it's also irresistible. If men were honest with themselves, they'd admit it's a stronger passion than lust. — Norman Lock

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

But because I do not wish to be remembered (if I will be remembered) as a self-indulgent fantasist, I'll skip the purple patch for now, however much I wish to write it. I need to make amends for my indifference, for having turned my back on the world in favor of the beauties of the way. I'll try to study cruelty (I regret my own) and render it in more familiar terms. — Norman Lock

Hello Huckleberry!"
"Hello, yourself, and see how you like it."
"What's that you got?"
"Dead cat."
"Lemme see him, Huck. My, he's pretty stiff. Where'd you get him?"
"Bought him off'n a boy. — Mark Twain

There ain't anything that is so interesting to look at as a place that a book has talked about.
Huck Finn — Mark Twain

You may say what you want to, but in my opinion she had more sand in her than any girl I ever see; in my opinion she was just full of sand. — Mark Twain

If Miss Watson had told Huck what the Bible says about living in a resurrected body and being with people we love on a resurrected Earth with gardens and rivers and mountains and untold adventures
now that would have gotten his attention. — Randy Alcorn

Cat my dogs ef it ain't de powerfulest dream I ever seen," as Joyce, quoting Twain, copied in his notebook on Huckleberry Finn. — John "Book Of The Dark" Bishop

Human beings can be awful cruel to one another. — Mark Twain

Well, everybody does it that way, Huck."
"Tom, I am not everybody. — Mark Twain

Bekase why: would a wise man ant to live in de mid's er such a blimblammin' all de time? No
'deed he wouldn't. A wise man 'ud take en buil' a biler-factry; en den he could shet down de biler-factory when he want to res'. — Mark Twain

Reared in rural southern Alabama, we enjoyed an idyllic Huck Finn boyhood. But education there was casual at best. Our mother and father were high school teachers and challenged the pervasive easy-going ignorance. — Gregory Benford

I felt very good; I judged I had done it pretty neat
I reckoned Tom Sawyer couldn't a done it no neater himself. Of course he would a throwed more style into it, but I can't do that very handy, not being brung up with it. — Mark Twain

America is, and always has been, undecided about whether it will be the United States of Tom or the United States of Huck. The United States of Tom looks at misery and says: Hey, I didn't do it. It looks at inequity and says: All my life I busted my butt to get where I am, so don't come crying to me. Tom likes kings, codified nobility, unquestioned privilege. Huck likes people, fair play, spreading the truck around. Whereas Tom knows, Huck wonders. Whereas Huck hopes, Tom presumes. Whereas Huck cares, Tom denies. These two parts of the American Psyche have been at war since the beginning of the nation, and come to think of it, these two parts of the World Psyche have been at war since the beginning of the world, and the hope of the nation and of the world is to embrace the Huck part and send the Tom part back up the river, where it belongs. — George Saunders