Quotes from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain

Quotes from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain Life on the Mississippi is a memoir by Mark Twain. In it, he describes his many adventures and experiences on the river, with its history, features, etc. Here are a few quotes from the book: Quotes From Chapter 1 The Mississippi is well worth reading about. It is not a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable. Considering the Missouri its main branch, it is the longest river in the worldfour thousand three hundred miles. It seems safe to say that it is also the crookedest river in the world, since in one part of its journey it uses up one thousand three hundred miles to cover the same ground that the crow would fly over in six hundred and seventy-five.The world and the books are so accustomed to use, and over-use, the word new in connection with our country, that we early get and permanently retain the impression that there is nothing old about it. Quotes From Chapters 3 and 4 Sired by a hurricane, damd by an earthquake.Ch. 3When Im playful I use the meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude for a seine, and drag the Atlantic Ocean for whales! I scratch my head with the lightning, and purr myself to sleep with the thunder!Ch. 3Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.Ch. 4 Quotes From Chapters 6 and 7 I was gratified to be able to answer promptly and I did. I said I didnt know.Ch. 6Your true pilot cares nothing about anything on earth but the river, and his pride in his occupation surpasses the pride of kings.Ch. 7By the Shadow of Death, but hes a lightning pilot!Ch. 7 Quotes From Chapters 8 and 9 Here is a proud devil, thought I; here is a limb of Satan that would rather send us all to destruction than put himself under obligations to me, because I am not yet one of the salt of the earth and privileged to snub captains and lord it over everything dead and alive in a steamboat.Ch. 8I felt like a skinful of dry bones and all of them trying to ache at once.Ch. 8You can depend on it, Ill learn him or kill him.Ch. 8The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful booka book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.Ch. 9 Quotes From Chapter 17 In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old OÃ ¶litic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. Quotes From Chapter 23 Give an Irishman lager for a month, and hes a dead man. An Irishman is lined with copper, and the beer corrodes it. But whiskey polishes the copper and is the saving of him, sir. Quotes From Chapters 43-46 Ive worked up a business here that would satisfy any man, dont care who he is. Five years ago, lodged in an attic; live in a swell house now, with a mansard roof, and all the modern inconveniences.Ch. 43I found the half-forgotten Southern intonations and elisions as pleasing to my ear as they had formerly been. A Southerner talks music. At least it is music to me, but then I was born in the South. The educated Southerner has no use for an r, except at the beginning of a word.Ch. 44In the South the war is what A.D. is elsewhere; they date from it.Ch. 45War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull.Ch. 45Sir Walter [Scott] had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war.Ch. 46 Quotes From Chapter 52 The letter was a pure swindle, and that is the truth. And take it by and large, it was without a compeer among swindles. It was perfect, it was rounded, symmetrical, complete, colossal!

An Introduction to Literary Nonfiction

An Introduction to Literary Nonfiction Literary nonfiction is a type of prose that employs the literary techniques usually associated with fiction or poetry to report on persons, places, and events in the real world without altering facts. The genre of literary nonfiction, also known as creative nonfiction, is broad enough to include travel writing, nature writing, science writing, sports writing, biography, autobiography, memoir,interviews, and familiar and personal essays. Literary nonfiction is alive and well, but it is not without its critics. Examples Here are several examples of literary nonfiction from noted authors: The Cries of London, by Joseph AddisonDeath of a Soldier, by Louisa May AlcottA Glorious Resurrection, by Frederick DouglassThe San Francisco Earthquake, by Jack LondonThe Watercress Girl, by Henry Mayhew Observations The word literary masks all kinds of ideological concerns, all kinds of values, and is finally more a way of looking at a text, a way of reading...than an inherent property of a text.(Chris Anderson, Introduction: Literary Nonfiction and Composition in Literary Nonfiction: Theory, Criticism, Pedagogy)Fictional Devices in Literary NonfictionOne of the profound changes to have affected serious writing in recent years has been the spread of fiction and poetry techniques into literary nonfiction: the show, don’t tell requirement, the emphasis on concrete sensory detail and avoidance of abstraction, the use of recurrent imagery as symbolic motif, the taste for the present tense, even the employment of unreliable narrators. There has always been some crossover between the genres. I am no genre purist, and welcome the cross-pollination, and have dialogue scenes in my own personal essays (as did Addison and Steele). But it is one thing to accept using dialogue scenes or lyrical imager y in a personal narrative, and quite another to insist that every part of that narrative be rendered in scenes or concrete sensory descriptions. A previous workshop teacher had told one of my students, Creative non-fiction is the application of fictional devices to memory. With such narrow formulae, indifferent to nonfictions full range of options, is it any wonder that students have started to shy away from making analytical distinctions or writing reflective commentary?(Phillip Lopate, To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction) Practical Nonfiction vs. Literary NonfictionPractical nonfiction is designed to communicate information in circumstances where the quality of the writing is not considered as important as the content. Practical nonfiction appears mainly in popular magazines, newspaper Sunday supplements, feature articles, and in self-help and how-to books...Literary nonfiction puts emphasis on the precise and skilled use of words and tone, and the assumption that the reader is as intelligent as the writer. While information is included, insight about that information, presented with some originality, may predominate. Sometimes the subject of literary nonfiction may not at the onset be of great interest to the reader, but the character of the writing may lure the reader into that subject.Literary nonfiction appears in books, in some general magazines such as The New Yorker, Harpers, the Atlantic, Commentary, the New York Review of Books, in many so-called little or small-circulation magazines, in a fe w newspapers regularly and in some other newspapers from time to time, occasionally in a Sunday supplement, and in book review media.(Sol Stein, Stein on Writing: A Master Editor of Some of the Most Successful Writers of Our Century Shares His Craft Techniques and Strategies) Literary Nonfiction in the English DepartmentIt might be the case that composition studies...needs the category of literary nonfiction to assert its place in the hierarchy of discourse comprising the modern English department. As English departments became increasingly centered on the interpretation of texts, it became increasingly important for compositionists to identify texts of their own.(Douglas Hesse, The Recent Rise of Literary Nonfiction: A Cautionary Assay in Composition Theory for the Postmodern Classroom)Whether critics are arguing about contemporary American nonfiction for historical or theoretical purposes, one of the primary (overt and usually stated) aims is to persuade other critics to take literary nonfiction seriously- to grant it the status of poetry, drama, and fiction.(Mark Christopher Allister, Refiguring the Map of Sorrow: Nature Writing and Autobiography)