Hand-picked quotes from Mark Twain's letters, shown previously on rhumba.com.

"I have spent three delightful days in Hannibal, loitering around all day long, examining the localities and talking with the greyheads who were boys and girls with me 30 or 40 years ago. It has been a moving time ... Lieutenant Hickman, the spruce young handsomely uniformed volunteer of 1846 called on me—a grisly elephantine patriarch of 65 now, his grace all vanished.

"The world which I knew in its blossoming youth is old and bowed and melancholy now. Its soft cheeks are leathery and wrinkled. The fire is gone out of its eyes and the spring from its step. It will be dust and ashes when I come again. I have been clasping hands with the moribund—and usually they said, "It is for the last time.""

1882; The 46-year old Clemens writes to wife Olivia Langdon of a visit to his boyhood hometown, Hannibal Missouri, taken while touring to complete Life on the Mississippi. Note the striking, bittersweet contrast between his comments' melancholy tone and the adjective chosen to describe the visit, "delightful."

"I had to submit to the customary & exasperating drive around town in a freezing open buggy this morning (at Norwich) to see the wonders of the village... I must sit and shiver and stare at a melancholy grove of skeleton trees & listen while my friend gushes enthusiastic statistics & dimensions. All towns are alike—all have the same stupid trivialities to show, & all demand an impossible interest at the suffering stranger's hands. Why won't these insane persecutors believe me when I protest pleadingly that I don't care two cents for all the thrilling wonders the village can boast. [After the natural wonders are all visited, then we have to call on other inanimate wonders with dull faces, but with legs to them that show them to be human: the mayor; the richest man; the wag of the village (who instantly assails me with old stale jokes and humorous profanity); the village editor—& a lot more of people I take no possible interest in and don't want to see. And when by some divine accident one of them isn't at home, what a fervent prayer of thankfulness rises up in my heart!]"

1869; Clemens, now 33, a celebrity and veteran touring lecturer, frustratedly expresses to future wife Olivia Langdon the discomfort and boredom inflicted by well-meaning friends and acquaintences while on tour. That he is staying with these people to avoid offending them, and the expense of hotel lodgings, is a 19th century manifestation of a 20th century expression: "There ain't no free."

"Out of a mass of letters not yet mailed I send you three. The letters all seem to be about alike, but I take these because one blackguards Palestine scenery, another mentions Nazareth which is a town widely known in America, the third gently touches the stupid gang of scholastic asses who go browsing through the Holy Land reducing miracles to purely natural occurrences—& all three tickle my pilgrims on the raw."

1867; a 31 year-old Clemens submits material to John Russell Young, the 26 year-old managing editor of the New York Tribune. Clemens was at the time touring the Middle East on the ship Quaker City, an excursion which would ultimately result in his first full-length commercial success, The Innocents Abroad. The three letters never appeared in the Tribune, but are believed to appear in the book.

'My Dear Bro: To use a French expression, I have "got my d—d satisfy" at last. Two years' time will make us capitalists, in spite of anything. Therefore, we need fret and fume, and worry and doubt no more, but just lie still and put up with privations for six months. Perhaps 3 months will "let us out." Then, if Government refuses to pay the rent on your new office, we can do it ourselves. We have got to wait six weeks, anyhow, for a dividend, maybe longer—but that it will come, there is no shadow of a doubt. I have got the thing sifted down to a dead moral certainty. I own one-eighth of the new "Monitor Ledge, Clemens Company," and money can't buy a foot of it; because I know it to contain our fortune.'

1862; a 26 year-old Twain writes from Nevada to older brother Orion, regarding his hopes for a mining venture to which he and three comrades would dedicate their backs over the next months. Little is known of the outcome, though it seems certain it did not yield the expected fortune.

"My brain was flooded with tender memories of blessings brought to me by this paternal administration that was now dying—memories of clerkships which I had held & salaries I had received for work which was never required of me; memories of the franking privilege enjoyed by me, along with all the cooks, & barbers, & Congressmen, & correspondents in Washington; of building-stone which I had been allowed to sell from the Capitol grounds & pocket the money, owing to my acquaintance with certain officials of the Senate; of sums I had clandestinely amassed by procuring & selling to the Associated Press the President's several Messages before they were transmitted to Congress—these & a thousand touching recollections of a like nature came thronging in sad procession down the corridors of my memory, & I bowed my head and wept."

1869; While corresponding from Washington, a 33 year-old Twain writes nostalgically for the New York Tribune, of the end of Andrew Johnson's administration.

"Tell Aunt Mary that I am sorry she thought I intended to study law, because to my mind, that is proof positive that her excellent judgment has erred this time. I do not love the law. And besides, there are many young lawyers here, and I am too generous to allow the glare from my lamp of genius to dim the feeble lustre of their two-penny dips. In a word, you know—I don't want to be the means of showing them how little the Lord has done for them."

1861; A 25 year-old Twain writes his Mother Jane Lampton Clemens from Carson City, Nevada Territories. "Aunt Mary" is a fictitious person, a disguised reference to a family acquaintance.

"They used to bring loads of beer bottles up at midnight, & get drunk, & shout & fire off their pistols in the room, & throw their empty bottles out the window at the Chinamen below. You'd hear them count 'One-two-three-fire!' & then you'd hear the bottles crash on the China roofs & see the poor Chinamen scatter like flies. O, it was dreadful!

1864; A 28 year-old Twain writes fellow writer Dan De Quille, reconstructing his (former) landlady's description of his (Twain's) and friend Steve Gillis' rowdy behavior in their San Francisco lodgings.

Letter to (well-known humorist) Bret Hart; 1867

[They] "...seemed to be a mob of empty headed whipper-snappers that had only come to Congress to make incessant motions, propose eternal amendments, and rise to everlasting points of order. They glanced at the galleries oftener than they looked at the Speaker; they put their feet on the desks as if they were in a beer-mill; they made more racket than a rookery, and let on to know more than any body of men ever did know or ever could know by any possibility whatsoever."

Commenting on the U.S. Congress; 1867

"You must not place too much weight upon this idea of moving the capital from Washington. St. Louis is in some respects a better place than Washington though there isn't more than a toss-up between the two after all. One is dead & the other in a trance..."

Letter to (sister) Pamela Moffett; 1869

"I couldn't get along without work now. I bury myself in it up to the ears. Long hours—8 and 9 on a stretch sometimes. And all the days, Sundays included. It isn't all for print, by any means, for much of it fails to suit me—50,000 words of it in the past year. It was because of the deadness which invaded me when Susy died."

1898; To dear friend and famous author William Dean Howells, regarding daughter Susy Clemens, who died in August 1896, at age 24.