“The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious. And why shouldn't it be?--it is the same the angels breathe.”

“New Orleans food is as delicious as the less criminal forms of sin.”

“It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:'All right, then, I'll go to hell'- and tore it up.”

“Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.”

“All the rest of [Shakespeare's] vast history, as furnished by the biographers, is built up, course upon course, of guesses, inferences, theories, conjectures — an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising sky-high from a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential facts.”

“To place man properly at the present time, he stands somewhere between the angels and the French.”

“High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.”