A Quote by Mark Twain

I wrote 'Tom Sawyer' and 'Huck Finn' for adults exclusively, and it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean.

Mark Twain

Quote Topics

Access Adults Again Allowed Always Becomes Been Boys Boys And Girls Clean Find Me Mind Never Sawyer Them Tom Washed Wrote Youth

Quote Author

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

If Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer were alive today, we’d say they had ADD or a conduct disorder. They [boys] are who they are, and we need to love them for who they are. Let’s not try to rewire them.

Michael Gurian

The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave.

Mark Twain

Mark Twain didn't psychoanalyze Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer. Dickens didn't put Oliver Twist on the couch because he was hungry! Good copy comes out of people, Johnny, not out of a lot of explanatory medical terms.

Samuel Fuller

I've grown up well, partly because there weren't great girls' literature - Nancy Drew, maybe - but there weren't things. So there was Huck Finn and "Spin And Marty." The boys characters were interesting and you lived through them when you're watching it.

Meryl Streep

Like every child growing up in America, I read 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' and 'Huckleberry Finn.' I liked them well enough, but I didn't love them.

Caroline Lawrence

I liked Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, and that is the kind of character that I would like to have played. That would have been more in tune with who I really was.

Keith Thibodeaux

I believe that it is only through empathy, that the pain experienced by an Algerian woman, a North Korean dissident, a Rwandan child or an Iraqi prisoner, becomes real to me and not just passing news. And it is at times like this when I ask myself, am I prepared - like Huck Finn - to give up Sunday school heaven for the kind of hell that Huck chose?

Azar Nafisi

Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.

Simone de Beauvoir

I did my first musical in 4th grade as Huck Finn. By 11th grade, I was starring in 'Godspell' and 'Pippin' and pretending to be Che in 'Evita' in my bedroom. Singing has always been a huge part of me.

Eric McCormack

Titian and Rembrandt, Monet and Rodin, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, Mark Twain and Henry James, Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop, to name a few. Twain wrote 'Tom Sawyer' at 41 and bettered it with 'Huckleberry Finn' at 50; Wright completed Fallingwater at 72 and worked on the Guggenheim Museum until his death at 91.

David Galenson

Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present … Eating, sleeping, cleaning – the years no longer rise up towards heaven, they lie spread out ahead, grey and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won.

Simone de Beauvoir

When I wrote 'Marley & Me,' I had a clear audience in mind. And it did not include children. I wrote my book for adults and assumed only adults, and possibly teenagers, would be drawn to it.

John Grogan

I always say there's no more little girls, just boys with breasts. Girls act like boys nowadays. Teenage girls, they go after boys. They're predatory just like boys. My goal is to keep my girls, girls.

Chris Rock

The StarTalks - while kids can watch them, they're actually targeted at adults. Because adults outnumber kids five to one, and adults vote, and adults wield resources, and adults are heads of agencies. So if we're going to affect policy, or affect attitudes, for me, the adults have always been the target population.