Don't tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don't tell them where they know the fish.

We catched fish, and talked, and we took a swim now and then to keep off sleepiness. It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn’t ever feel like talking loud, and it warn’t often that we laughed, only a kind of low chuckle. We had mighty good weather, as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all, that night, nor the next, nor the next.

School gets in the way of my learning.

For the majority of us, the past is a regret, the future an experiment

It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart: the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you.

To gnaw on is human, towards digest, divine.

I have at last, after several months' experience, made up my mind that [New York] is a splendid desert--a domed and steepled solitude, where the stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race.