I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

The only people who should use the possessive 'we' are kings, newspaper editors, and persons with tapeworms.

If the man doesn't believe as we do, we say he is a crank, and that settles it. I mean, it does nowadays, because now we can't burn him.

She kept up her compliments, and I kept up my determination to deserve them or die.

On with the dance, let the joy be unconfined.

He has been a doctor a year now and has had two patients - no, three, I think - yes, it was three; I attended their funerals.

The self taught man seldom knows anything accurately, and he does not know a tenth as much as he could have known if he had worked under teachers, and besides, he brags, and is the means of fooling other thoughtless people into going and doing as he himself has done.