Huck Quotes

Hello Huckleberry!"
"Hello, yourself, and see how you like it."
"What's that you got?"
"Dead cat."
"Lemme see him, Huck. My, he's pretty stiff. Where'd you get him?"
"Bought him off'n a boy. ~ Mark Twain

If you think it ain't dismal and lonesome out in a fog that way, by yourself, in the night, you try it once – you'll see. ~ Mark Twain

Mark Twain didn't psychoanalyze Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer. Dickens didn't put Oliver Twist on the couch because he was hungry! Good copy comes out of people, Johnny, not out of a lot of explanatory medical terms. ~ Samuel Fuller

He had a dream and it shot him. ~ Mark Twain

America is, and always has been, undecided about whether it will be the United States of Tom or the United States of Huck. The United States of Tom looks at misery and says: Hey, I didn't do it. It looks at inequity and says: All my life I busted my butt to get where I am, so don't come crying to me. Tom likes kings, codified nobility, unquestioned privilege. Huck likes people, fair play, spreading the truck around. Whereas Tom knows, Huck wonders. Whereas Huck hopes, Tom presumes. Whereas Huck cares, Tom denies. These two parts of the American Psyche have been at war since the beginning of the nation, and come to think of it, these two parts of the World Psyche have been at war since the beginning of the world, and the hope of the nation and of the world is to embrace the Huck part and send the Tom part back up the river, where it belongs. ~ George Saunders

I live in two worlds. One is a world of books. I've been a resident of Faulkner's Yoknapatowpha County, hunted the white whale aboard the Pequod, fought alongside Napoleon, sailed a raft with Huck and Jim, committed absurdities with Ignatius J. Reilly, rode a sad train with Anna Karenina, and strolled down Swann's Way. ~ Rory Gilmore

I reck'n I knows what I knows. ~ Mark Twain

When I heard 'Moon River', at first I thought it was just a nice song, but then I started paying attention to the words and realized this song was about Huck Finn. I just love the words, that it's kind of you and me against the world, and we're going to make it together. ~ Drew Holcomb

It was very interesting time to be in England. Even at that point [John] Lennon and [Paul] McCartney influenced my writing. I thought, "maybe there is a huck or two in here I haven't thought of". ~ Gordon Lightfoot

One of the problems with putting Huck Finn into a movie or on the stage is, you always make the white people stupid and racist. The point is, they don't know they're racist. ~ Hal Holbrook

It made me shiver. And I about made up my mind to pray, and see if I couldn't try to quit being the kind of a boy I was and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn't come. Why wouldn't they? It warn't no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from ME, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn't come. It was because my heart warn't right; it was because I warn't square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting ON to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth SAY I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger's owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can't pray a lie--I found that out.

So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn't know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I'll go and write the letter--and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote:

Miss Watson, your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville, and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send.

HUCK FINN.

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid ~ Mark Twain

What a peach of a night this had turned out to be.

Everett fucking Moreau: master planner.

Like that little French guy who used to get with tall ladies to prove a point. Napoleon.

But not like him at all, except for they both ended up fucked on an island, if he didn't misremember his history. Or maybe it was Huck Finn who got fucked on an island.

Either way, he was the idiot getting fucked on a water-locked landmass this fine evening. ~ Eoin Colfer

I've grown up well, partly because there weren't great girls' literature - Nancy Drew, maybe - but there weren't things. So there was Huck Finn and "Spin And Marty." The boys characters were interesting and you lived through them when you're watching it. ~ Meryl Streep

Well, everybody does it that way, Huck."
"Tom, I am not everybody. ~ Mark Twain

Tom Sawyer said I was a numskull. ~ Mark Twain

In a culture that is becoming ever more story-stupid, in which a representative of the Coca-Cola company can, with a straight face, pronounce, as he donates a collection of archival Coca-Cola commercials to the Library of Congress, that 'Coca-Cola has become an integral part of people's lives by helping to tell these stories,' it is perhaps not surprising that people have trouble teaching and receiving a novel as complex and flawed as Huck Finn, but it is even more urgent that we learn to look passionately and technically at stories, if only to protect ourselves from the false and manipulative ones being circulated among us. ~ George Saunders

What we got is NOW, Huck, and now is forever. Until it ain't. So, you can't worry over nothing except putting off the end a your story as long as you can, and finishing it with a bang. ~ Robert Coover

I read Norman Lock's The Boy in His Winter with delight and amazement. Styled in the vernacular of a rapidly changing America, it stays true to the themes of Mark Twain's original: class relations, race and slavery, childhood innocence, moral hypocrisy - and, of course, the stark beauty and unforgiving nature of America's greatest river. I finished this absolutely elegant narrative feeling that Huck Finn has never been more alive. ~ David Oshinsky

This ain't no thirty-seven year job, this is a thirty-eight year job, Tom Sawyer. ~ Mark Twain

I found the role model to inspire me to handle such situations with more grace, maturity, and, most important of all, results...

I reread Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, and I realized I had found my hero in Atticus Finch...

It hit me like a thunderbolt. You see, Atticus knows everything Huck knows. He knows society is racist. He recognizes the violence, hypocrisy, injustice, and ignorance of society. He knows he is going to lose.

But Atticus does not light out for the territory. He goes into the courtroom to fight the fight as best as he can, because it is what he believes in. He doesn't do it because of the law, or the rules, or what people will think. He has his own code, and he lives by it as well as he can.

I still cry when I think about this. My classroom is my courtroom. I am going to lose more than I win. There are many times when, despite my efforts, I will lose children to poverty, ignorance, and, most tragically, a society that embraces mediocrity...

I've made plenty of mistakes since rediscovering Atticus, but I've always been able to hold my head up to my students. Atticus showed me the way. ~ Rafe Esquith

Confound it, it's foolish, Tom ~ Mark Twain

Look at what I wrote at the beginning of this memoir. Have I caught anything at all of the extraordinary night when Paul Dempster was born? I am pretty sure that my little sketch of Percy Boyd Staunton is accurate, but what about myself? I have always sneered at autobiographies and memoirs in which the writer appears at the beginning as a charming, knowing little fellow, possessed of insights and perceptions beyond his years, yet offering these with false naivete to the reader, as though to say, 'What a little wonder I was, but All Boy.' Have the writers any notion or true collection of what a boy is?
I have and I have reinforced it by forty-five years of teaching boys. A boy is a man in miniature, and though he may sometimes exhibit notable virtue, as well as characteristics that seem to be charming because they are childlike, he is also schemer, self-seeker, traitor, Judas, crook, and villain - in short, a man. Oh these autobiographies in which the writer postures and simpers as a David Copperfield or a Huck Finn! False, false as harlots' oaths!
Can I write truly of my boyhood? Or will that disgusting self-love which so often attaches itself to a man's idea of his youth creep in and falsify the story? I can but try. And to begin I must give you some notion of the village in which Percy Boyd Staunton and Paul Dempster and I were born. ~ Robertson Davies

After a time, it seemed that the world inside the books became my world. So when I thought of my childhood, it was dandelion wine and ice cream on a summer porch, like Ray Bradbury, and catching catfish with Huck Finn. My own memories receded and the book memories became the real memories, far more than the outside, far more even than in here. ~ Rene Denfeld

Things settled into a lazy pattern. School, chores, and long hours down by the river. Kiernan talked about the books he read sometimes, even loaned me a few. But I liked it better when he read to me or just told me the stories. The words were more real that way, more exciting. Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Ragged Dick, and all the others seemed flat and dull on the page, but Kiernan was good at making them come alive. ~ Rysa Walker

Sometimes I wish we could hear of a country that's out of kings. ~ Mark Twain

I grew up like Huck Finn, always outdoors, exploring, collecting frogs - there was space everywhere. I want my kids to experience that too. I love being outside. ~ Josh Duhamel

If Miss Watson had told Huck what the Bible says about living in a resurrected body and being with people we love on a resurrected Earth with gardens and rivers and mountains and untold adventures
now that would have gotten his attention. ~ Randy Alcorn

Siddhartha wants liberation, Dante wants Beatrice, Frodo wants to get to Mount Doom - we all want something. Quest is elemental to the human experience. All road narratives are to some extent built on quest. If you're a woman, though, this fundamental possibility of quest is denied. You can't go anywhere if you can't step out onto a road ...
... (T)here is no female counterpart in our culture to Ishmael or Huck Finn. There is no Dean Moriarty, Sal, or even a Fuckhead. It sounds like a doctoral crisis, but it's not. As a fifteen-year-old hitchhiker, my survival depended upon other people's ability to envision a possible future for me. Without a Melvillean or Kerouacian framework, or at least some kind of narrative to spell out a potential beyond death, none of my resourcefulness or curiosity was recognizable, and therefore I was unrecognizable. ~ Vanessa Veselka

"Librarians and teachers saved me and my mind. Huck showed me it wasn't only me, but Tom is who I wished I was."
- April (does feral sometimes) Gavey ~ April (does Feral Sometimes) Gavey

I said, "Don't do nothing of the kind; it's one of the most jackass ideas I ever struck; ~ Mark Twain

There on the dune, beside the table, one of the camel boys has his arm around the other, and they sit there like that as they watch the sun. The dunes are turning the same shades of adobe and aqua as the buildings of Marrakech. Two boys, arms around each other. To Less, it seems so foreign. It makes him sad. In his world, he never sees straight men doing this. Just as a gay couple cannot walk hand in hand down the streets of Marrakech, he thinks, two men, best friends, cannot walk hand in hand down the streets of Chicago. They cannot sit on a dune like these teenagers and watch a sunset in each other's embrace. This Tom Sawyer love for Huck Finn. ~ Andrew Sean Greer

J. D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield is a literary descendant of Huck Finn: more educated and sophisticated, the son of affluent New Yorkers, but like Huck a youthful runaway from a world of adult hypocrisy, venality and, to use one of his own favourite words, phoniness. What particularly appals Holden is the eagerness of his peers to adopt that corrupt grownup behaviour. ~ David Lodge

If Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer were alive today, we'd say they had ADD or a conduct disorder. They [boys] are who they are, and we need to love them for who they are. Let's not try to rewire them. ~ Michael Gurian

But because I do not wish to be remembered (if I will be remembered) as a self-indulgent fantasist, I'll skip the purple patch for now, however much I wish to write it. I need to make amends for my indifference, for having turned my back on the world in favor of the beauties of the way. I'll try to study cruelty (I regret my own) and render it in more familiar terms. ~ Norman Lock

I wrote 'Tom Sawyer' and 'Huck Finn' for adults exclusively, and it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. ~ Mark Twain

Hunter and John [Belushi] both shared a sense of possibility, and they seemed to have no limits. There was no Governor of the night. It was like being off on adventures with Huck and Tom - everything was possible. ~ Corey Seymour

Haven't you ever harbored the secret thought that somewhere Huck and Jim are - at this instant - poling their raft down some river just beyond our reach, so much more real are they than the shoe clerk who fitted us just a forgotten day ago? ~ Dan Simmons

It ain't no use to try to learn you nothing, Huck. ~ Mark Twain

Cat my dogs ef it ain't de powerfulest dream I ever seen," as Joyce, quoting Twain, copied in his notebook on Huckleberry Finn. ~ John "Book Of The Dark" Bishop

Giving jazz the Congressional seal of approval is a little like making Huck Finn an honorary Boy Scout. ~ Melvin Maddocks

It inspired a kind of Huck Finn moment when I decided it was better to risk hell than shrivel in the midst of a toxic Southern Baptist morality. ~ Kelly J. Cogswell

I reck'n I knows sense when I sees it; en dey ain' no sense in sich doin's as dat. ~ Mark Twain

You can't pray a lie" Huck Finn ~ Mark Twain

I believe that it is only through empathy, that the pain experienced by an Algerian woman, a North Korean dissident, a Rwandan child or an Iraqi prisoner, becomes real to me and not just passing news. And it is at times like this when I ask myself, am I prepared - like Huck Finn - to give up Sunday school heaven for the kind of hell that Huck chose? ~ Azar Nafisi

[On Jimmy Carter] Huck Finn. Loss of identity drives people to nostalgia. Electronic man has no physical body, so he puts nostalgia in its place. ~ Marshall McLuhan

It hadn't ever come home to me before, what this thing was that I was doing. ~ Mark Twain

The raft was seized, with a noise like needles knitting, and we were hemmed in for winter -- river and the old channel's oxbow lake having frozen solid. By now, we guessed we were not two ordinary river travelers...it must have been the river that was extraordinary: a marvel that protected us by the same mysterious action that had given a common horse wings and changed a woman into a laurel tree. ~ Norman Lock

The mob hysteria over pedophiles has reached epidemic proportions and driven parents to panic. Today's Just Williams, today's Huck Finns, today's Swallows and Amazons are deprived of the freedom to roam that was one of the delights of childhood in earlier times (when the actual, as opposed to the perceived, risk of molestation was probably no less). ~ Richard Dawkins

They don't like my kind in here," Arthur said to CJ...I own a shop on The Aisle. Huck there" - Arthur nodded at the barkeep - "isn't a fan of the wedding industry."
"Why not?"
"Guy's been divorced three times and has a bar called Suckers in the most married-est town on earth. He caters to the underground wedding haters and single groomsmen. ~ Jamie Farrell

Courts musn't interfere and separate families if they could help it. Said he'd druther not take a child away from its father. ~ Mark Twain

You may say what you want to, but in my opinion she had more sand in her than any girl I ever see; in my opinion she was just full of sand. ~ Mark Twain

Consider the great Samuel Clemens. Huckleberry Finn is one of the few books that all American children are mandated to read: Jonathan Arac, in his brilliant new study of the teaching of Huck, is quite right to term it 'hyper-canonical.' And Twain is a figure in American history as well as in American letters. The only objectors to his presence in the schoolroom are mediocre or fanatical racial nationalists or 'inclusivists,' like Julius Lester or the Chicago-based Dr John Wallace, who object to Twain's use - in or out of 'context' - of the expression 'nigger.' An empty and formal 'debate' on this has dragged on for decades and flares up every now and again to bore us. But what if Twain were taught as a whole? He served briefly as a Confederate soldier, and wrote a hilarious and melancholy account, The Private History of a Campaign That Failed. He went on to make a fortune by publishing the memoirs of Ulysses Grant. He composed a caustic and brilliant report on the treatment of the Congolese by King Leopold of the Belgians. With William Dean Howells he led the Anti-Imperialist League, to oppose McKinley's and Roosevelt's pious and sanguinary war in the Philippines. Some of the pamphlets he wrote for the league can be set alongside those of Swift and Defoe for their sheer polemical artistry. In 1900 he had a public exchange with Winston Churchill in New York City, in which he attacked American support for the British war in South Africa and British support for the American war ~ Christopher Hitchens

Steal a chicken if you get a chance, Huck, because if you don't want it, someone else does and a good deed ain't never forgotten. ~ Mark Twain

Talking of appearances, I would like my future readers to know that the picture of Jim and me that Thomas Hart Benton painted on the wall of the Missouri state capitol bears not the slightest resemblance to either one of us. ... I've never been satisfied with any representation of myself and have seen only one picture of Jim that did him justice. I don't know why this should be, unless it is evidence of a nearly universal prejudice against us, instigated by Sunday school superintendents, Republicans, and bigots. ~ Norman Lock

I felt very good; I judged I had done it pretty neat
I reckoned Tom Sawyer couldn't a done it no neater himself. Of course he would a throwed more style into it, but I can't do that very handy, not being brung up with it. ~ Mark Twain

I found no muse on Hyperion during those first years. For many, the expansion of distance because of limited transportation - EMVs were unreliable, skimmers scarce - and the contraction of artificial consciousness due to absence of datasphere, no access to the All Thing, and only one fatline transmitter - all led to a renewal of creative energies, a new realization of what it meant to be human and an artist. Or so I heard. No muse appeared. My verse continued to be technically proficient and dead as Huck Finn's cat. I decided to kill myself. ~ Dan Simmons

Huck was always willing to take a hand in any enterprise that offered entertainment and required no capital, for he had a troublesome super-abundance of that sort of time which is not money. ~ Mark Twain