The Quotable Mark Twain: His Essential Aphorisms, Witticisms & Concise Opinions

From the author of the encyclopedic Mark Twain A to Z comes Mark Twain, accident ("the greatest of all the inventors") to Zola ("The manliest man in France"). This is certainly not the first compilation of Twain witticisms. Nor is it the second or third. But of the 1,800-plus quotations included in The Quotable Mark Twain, more than half do not appear in any other collection. This is because the book's editor, R. Kent Rasmussen, is a committed Twain-ophile who has read and reread nearly everything Twain ever wrote. In these pages Rasmussen offers up Twain's trenchant and provocative words on such wide-ranging subjects as fried chicken ("the art cannot be learned north of the line of Mason and Dixon, nor anywhere in Europe"), Hinduism ("It is a good and gentle religion, but inconvenient"), the multiplication table ("that odious and confusing and unvanquishable and unlearnable and shameless invention"), and stealing ("It is better to take what does not belong to you than to let it lie around neglected"). A browser's bonanza. --Jane Steinberg