“Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.”

“It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it's the parts that I do understand.”

“Pretty soon I wanted to smoke, and asked the widow to let me. But she wouldn't. She said it was a mean practice and wasn't clean, and I must try to not do it any more. That is just the way with some people. They get down on a thing when they don't know nothing about it. Here she was a-bothering about Moses, which was no kin to her, and no use to anybody, being gone, you see, yet finding a power of fault with me for doing a thing that had some good in it. And she took snuff, too; of course that was all right, because she done it herself.”

“In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.”

“But it seems to be a law of human constitution that those that deserve shall not have and those that do not deserve shall get everything that is worth having.”

“Cave is a good word.... The memory of a cave I used to know was always in my mind, with its lofty passages, its silence and solitude, its shrouding gloom, its sepulchral echoes, its fleeting lights, and more than all, its sudden revelations....”

“You meet people who forget you. You forget people you meet. But sometimes you meet those people you can't forget. Those are your 'friends”