The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Quotes

“Ah, if he could only die temporarily!”

“Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.”

“Wikipedia: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”

“Homely truth is unpalatable. ;Chapter 22”

“When one writes a novel about grown people, he knows exactly where to stop—that is, with a marriage; but when he writes of juveniles, he must stop where he best can.”

“What a curious kind of a fool a girl is! Never been licked in school! Shucks! What’s a licking! That’s just like a girl—they’re so thin-skinned and chicken-hearted.”

“Girls’ faces always tell on them. They ain’t got any backbone. ;Chapter 21”

“He was not the Model Boy of the village. He knew the model boy very well though—and loathed him. ;Chapter 2”

“To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing. ;Chapter 25”

“They said they would rather be outlaws a year in Sherwood Forest than President of the United States forever. ;Chapter 13”

““What’s your name?”
“Becky Thatcher. What’s yours? Oh, I know. It’s Thomas Sawyer.”
“That’s the name they lick me by. I’m Tom when I’m good.” ;Chapter 8”

“He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it — namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to obtain.
page 32”

“Huck was always willing to take a hand in any enterprise that offered entertainment and required no capital, for he had a troublesome superabundance of that sort of time which is not money. ;Chapter 29”

““Kill? Who said anything about killing? I would kill him if he was here; but not her. When you want to get revenge on a woman you don’t kill her—bosh! you go for her looks. You slit her nostrils—you notch her ears like a sow!” ;Chapter 35”

““Answer the gentleman, Thomas—don’t be afraid.”
Tom still hung fire.
“Now I know you’ll tell me,” said the lady. “The names of the first two disciples were—”
“David and Goliah!”
Let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of the scene. ;Chapter 5”

“Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden.
page 26”

“The minister gave out his text and droned along monotonously through an argument that was so prosy that many a head by and by began to nod — and yet it was an argument that dealt in limitless fire and brimstone and thinned the predestined elect down to a company so small as to be hardly worth the saving. ;Chapter 6”

“If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.
page 32 ;Chapter 4”

“There was no getting around the stubborn fact that taking sweetmeats was only "hooking," while taking bacon and hams and such valuables was plain simple stealing — and there was a command against that in the Bible. So they inwardly resolved that so long as they remained in the business, their piracies should not again be sullied with the crime of stealing. ;Chapter 14”

“A brown spotted lady-bug climbed the dizzy height of a grass blade, and Tom bent down close to it and said, “Lady-bug, lady-bug, fly away home, your house is on fire, your children’s alone,” and she took wing and went off to see about it—which did not surprise the boy, for he knew of old that this insect was credulous about conflagrations, and he had practised upon its simplicity more than once. ;Chapter 20”