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Quotations from the Project Gutenberg Editions of the Works of Mark Twain

by Mark Twain

Pages
about 25
Category
Literature & Fiction
Language
English
Reading time
28 min at 250 wpm
Start readingThe whole book, as cards or one word at a time. 15 min at 450 wpm in Read mode.

From the opening

Bret Harte got his California and his Californians by unconscious absorption, and put both of them into his tales alive. But when he came from the Pacific to the Atlantic and tried to do Newport life from study- conscious observation--his failure was absolutely monumental. Newport is a disastrous place for the unacclimated observer, evidently.

It is my belief that there are some "national" traits and things scattered about the world that are mere superstitions, frauds that have lived so long that they have the solid look of facts. One of them is the dogma that the French are the only chaste people in the world. Ever since I arrived in France this last time I have been accumulating doubts about that.

It would be too immodest. Also too gratuitously generous. And a shade too self-sufficient. No, he could not venture it. It would look too much like anxiety to get in at a feast where no plate had been provided for him.

A foreigner can photograph the exteriors of a nation, but I think that that is as far as he can get. I think that no foreigner can report its interior--its soul, its life, its speech, its thought. I think that a knowledge of these things is acquirable in only one way; not two or four or six [years]--absorption; years and years of unconscious absorption; years and years of intercourse with the life concerned; of living it, indeed; sharing personally in its shames and prides, its joys and griefs, its loves and hates, its prosperities and reverses, its shows and shabbinesses, its deep patriotisms, its whirlwinds of political passion, its adorations--of flag, and heroic dead, and the glory of the national name. Observation? Of what real value is it? One learns peoples through the heart, not the eyes or the intellect.

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