“I think we never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead--and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead, and then they would be honest so much earlier.”

“I am willing to be a literary thief if it has so been ordained; I am even willing to be caught robbing the ancient dead alongside of Hopkinson Smith, for he is my friend and a good fellow, and I think would be as honest as any one if he could do it without occasioning remark; but I am not willing to antedate his crimes by fifteen hundred years. I must ask you to knock off part of that.”

“I was dead for millions of years before I was born and it never inconvenienced me a bit.”

“Our opinions do not really blossom into fruition until we have expressed them to someone else.”

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”

“When I got there it was all still and Sunday-like, and hot and sunshiny - the hands was gone to the fields; and there was them kind of faint dronings of bugs an flies in the air that makes it seem so lonesome and like everybody's dead and gone; and if a breeze fans along and quivers the leaves, it makes you feel mournful, because you feel like it's spirits whispering - spirits that's been dead ever so many years - and you always think they're talking about you. ”

“Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.”