Written things are not for speech; their form is literary; they are stiff, inflexible, and will not lend themselves to happy and effective delivery with the tongue-where their purpose is to merely entertain, not instruct; they have to be limbered up, broken up, colloquialized and turned into common forms of premeditated talk-otherwise they will bore the house and not entertain it.

To my mind that literature is best and most enduring which is characterized by a noble simplicity.

None of us can have as many virtues as the fountain-pen, or half its cussedness; but we can try.

...one of the first achievements of the legislature was to institute a ten-thousand-dollar agricultural fair to show off forty dollars' worth of pumpkins in - however, the Territorial legislature was usually spoken of as the "asylum".

All say, ‘how hard it is that we have to die’ -- a strange complaint to come from the mouths of those who have had to live.

Perfect grammar - persistent, continuous, sustained - is the fourth dimension, so to speak; many have sought it, but none has found it.

Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.