A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thing book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat … - Mark Twain

When we think of friends, and call their faces out of the shadows, and their voices out of the echoes that faint along the corridors of memory, and do it without knowing why save that we love to do it, we content ourselves that that friendship is a Reality, and not a Fancy — that it is builded upon a rock, and not upon the sands that dissolve away with the ebbing tides and carry their monuments with them.

Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.

[On London Family Hotels] They are a London specialty. God has not permitted them to exist elsewhere. . . . All the modern inconveniences are furnished, and some that have been obsolete for a century. The bedrooms are hospitals for incurable furniture.