Quotes & Sayings About Huck Finn

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

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

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

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

[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

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

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

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

Tom Sawyer said I was a numskull. — Mark Twain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

{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

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

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

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 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