Among hundreds of anecdotes and quips attributed to Mark Twain was “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” which he wrote after the New York Journal published his obituary. Sadly, those reports have now been correct for a hundred and one years.
Twain wrote in Letters from the Earth:
“Life was not a valuable gift, but death was. Life was a fever-dream made up of joys embittered by sorrows, pleasure poisoned by pain; a dream that was a nightmare-confusion of spasmodic and fleeting delights, ecstasies, exultations, happinesses, interspersed with long-drawn miseries, griefs, perils, horrors, disappointments, defeats,humiliations, and despairs--the heaviest curse devisable by divine ingenuity; but death was sweet, death was gentle, death was kind; death healed the bruised spirit and the broken heart, and gave them rest and forgetfulness; death was man's best friend; when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free.”
April 21, 1910, Mark Twain died at the age of seventy-four. Near the end, the numerous dinner-speech invitations were declined — “Won’t go to any banquet not even the Last Supper,” he wrote in his RSVP to the Simplified Spelling Board — but Twain did keep busy. He dictated his autobiography, loosely-speaking, to his official biographer.
He left a wake of lawsuits wherever he went, one of them against his business manager for being in cahoots with the secretary who, Twain decided after seven years, was “a liar, a forger, a thief, a hypocrite, a drunkard, a sneak, a humbug, a traitor, a conspirator, a filthy-minded and salacious slut pining for seduction and always getting disappointed, poor child.”
Some Twain Quotes as Motivational Posters:
And finally,
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