A Quote by Mark Twain

The cigar-box which the European calls a 'lift' needs but to be compared with our elevators to be appreciated. The lift stops to reflect between floors. That is all right in a hearse, but not in elevators. The American elevator acts like a man's patent purge-it works.

Mark Twain

Quote Topics

Acts American Appreciated Between Box Calls Cigar Compared Elevator Elevators European Floors Lift Like Man Needs Our Patent Purge Reflect Right Stops Which Works

Quote Author

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

When I was a kid, I'd go to the African-American section in the bookstore, and I'd try and find African-American people I hadn't read before. So in that sense the category was useful to me. But it's not useful to me as I write. I don't sit down to write an African-American zombie story or an African-American story about elevators. I'm writing a story about elevators which happens to talk about race in different ways. Or I'm writing a zombie novel which doesn't have that much to do with being black in America. That novel is really about survival.

Colson Whitehead

I first sang 'Holding Back the Years' in my earliest band, Frantic Elevators. When the Elevators split and I started Simply Red, I returned to the song and wrote the 'I'll keep holding on' chorus.

Mick Hucknall

I hate elevators. I'm claustrophobic so for me to be in an elevator or small spaces is probably the worst thing on earth.

Aino Jawo

I'm a really claustrophobic person to begin with. I hate elevators, especially crammed elevators. I get really scared. So I think that it's very definitely scary when girls are all around me and I can't go anywhere. At the same time, I guess I got to get used to it, you know what I mean?

Justin Bieber

Why are people getting on elevators shocked to find people getting off elevators?

Brian Regan

Music is so powerful, it needs to be used for some kind of redeeming work. To lift peoples spirits, to lift their souls.

Bobby McFerrin

His whole body shakes with the strain as he tries to lift something he knows he can't lift, something everybody knows he can't lift. But, for just a second, when we hear the cement grind at our feet, we think, by golly, he might do it.

Ken Kesey

If I could give you one thought, it would be to lift someone up. Lift a stranger up--lift her up. I would ask you, mother and father, brother and sister, lovers, mother and daughter, father and son, lift someone. The very idea of lifting someone up will lift you, as well.

Maya Angelou

God's relationship with man does not work in a way in which man stumbles and then God has to drop what he is doing in order to lift him up; rather, man stumbles so that God can lift him up. Hence it is utterly impossible to truly diminish his glory.

Criss Jami

It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

God calls us to care for our fellow man, especially the neediest. I feel that call to lift up the less fortunate; the call to improve our communities and our state. It drives me to serve Louisiana as governor.

Kathleen Blanco

Not unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest, demanded participation in the decision-making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking. An impoverished hitch-hiker visiting any planets in the Sirius star system these days can pick up easy money working as a counsellor for neurotic elevators.

Douglas Adams

A wicked man in prayer may lift up his hands, but he cannot lift up his face.

Thomas Watson

Almost all of us have an elevator or two in our lives somewhere. We wait for them, we ride on them. We're annoyed by the wait but pleased with the lift.