A Quote by Mark Twain

It is human life. We are blown upon the world; we float buoyantly upon the summer air a little while, complacently showing off our grace of form and our dainty iridescent colors; then we vanish with a little puff, leaving nothing behind but a memory - and sometimes not even that. I suppose that at those solemn times when we wake in the deeps of the night and reflect, there is not one of us who is not willing to confess that he is really only a soap-bubble, and as little worth the making.

Mark Twain

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Air Behind Blown Bubble Colors Confess Dainty Even Float Form Grace Human Human Life Iridescent Leaving Life Little Little While Making Memory Night Nothing Off Only Our Puff Really Reflect Showing Showing Off Soap Solemn Sometimes Summer Suppose Then Those Times Us Vanish Wake While Willing World Worth

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Mark Twain
American - Writer
November 30, 1835 - April 21, 1910

I am dead against art's being self-expression. I see an inherent failure in any story which fails to detach itself from the author-detach itself in the sense that a well-blown soap-bubble detaches itself from the bowl of the blower's pipe and spherically takes off into the air as a new, whole, pure, iridescent world. Whereas the ill-blown bubble, as children know, timidly adheres to the bowl's lip, then either bursts or sinks flatly back again.

Elizabeth Bowen

We're trained to believe we should cling to one person only. Yet there are so many people who pass in and out of our lives. Good people, worth people, interesting people. Most of them stay for a little while and then move on. Some of them find a place with us and, if we let them, they enrich us. Don't close yourself off from the rest of the world, Eve. If you find someone who can make you understand a little more, laugh every now and then, give you a new experience, then never feel guilty. You'll just have more to give back to those who are closest to you.

Iris Johansen

Half the joy of life is in little things taken on the run... but let us keep our hearts young and our eyes open that nothing worth our while shall escape us.

Victor Cherbuliez

little sun little moon little dog and a little to eat and a little to love and a little to live for in a little room filled with little mice who gnaw and dance and run while I sleep waiting for a little death in the middle of a little morning in a little city in a little state my little mother dead my little father dead in a little cemetery somewhere. I have only a little time to tell you this: watch out for little death when he comes running but like all the billions of little deaths it will finally mean nothing and everything: all your little tears burning like the dove, wasted.

Charles Bukowski

To journey for the sake of saving our own lives is little by little to cease to live in any sense that really matters, even to ourselves, because it is only by journeying for the world's sake - even when the world bores and sickens and scares you half to death - that little by little we start to come alive.

Frederick Buechner

There are those who wake up each morning to conquer the day, and then there are those of us who wake up only because we have to. We live in the shadow of every neighborhood. We own little corner stores, live in run-down apartments that get too little light, and walk the same streets day after day. We spend our afternoons gazing lazily out of windows. Somnambulists, all of us. Someone else said it better: we wake to sleep and sleep to wake.

Dinaw Mengestu

The wisest is he that knows only that he knows nothing. God only knows. We mortals are only troubled with morbid little ideas, sired by circumstance and damned by folly. The human head can absorb only the flavorings of its surroundings. We assume that our faith political and our creed religious are founded upon our reason, when they are really made for us by social conditions over which we had little control.

William Cowper Brann

So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little.

Stephen King

In violent and chaotic times such as these, our only chance for survival lies in creating our own little islands of sanity and order, in making little havens of our homes.

Sue Kaufman

Pale amber sunlight falls across The reddening October trees.... Are we not better and at home In dreamful Autumn, we who deem No harvest joy is worth a dream? A little while and night shall come, A little while, then, let us dream.

Ernest Dowson

I've been really into a light, bright playfulness that's been missing. I looked at these '60s and '70s photos of Jackie O. She went to Capri every summer, but she was always a little more playful, a little more colorful, than she was in 'normal' life. And it was exciting to see her a little bit "off duty." The colors are from awning stripe umbrellas, from a really clear ocean, and from ripe citrus.

Christian Siriano

Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

William Shakespeare

Sometimes it seemed to him that his life was delicate as a dandelion. One little puff from any direction, and it was blown to bits.

Katherine Paterson

One little bird not larger than a sparrow, it may have been a Phalarope, would alight on the turbulent surface where the breakers were five or six feet high, and float buoyantly there like a duck, cunningly taking to its wings and lifting itself a few feet through the air over the foaming crest of each breaker, but sometimes outriding safely a considerable billow which hid it some seconds, when its instinct told it that it would not break. It was a little creature thus to sport with the ocean, but it was as perfect a success in its way as the breakers in theirs.

Henry David Thoreau

All I knew about Ireland before I went there was what I learned from watching soap commercials all my life. I was totally misinformed. I thought it was an Irish tradition where you don't even take a shower with your soap - you take your soap for a walk, you compliment the soap for a little while and then, suddenly, you just start hacking it up with a hunting knife.

Arj Barker

The first ghost to leave the world of the dead was Roger. He took a step forward, and turned to look back at Lyra, and laughed in surprise as he found himself turning into the night, the starlight, the air. . .and then he was gone, leaving behind such a vivid little burst of happiness.

Philip Pullman

A Quote by Mark Twain

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