| She said she never would or could love me
-- but she set herself the task of making a Christian of me. I said she
would succeed, but that in the meantime she would unwittingly dig a matrimonial
pit and end by tumbling into it -- and lo! the prophecy is fulfilled. - Letter to Jane Clemens, February 1869 |
 Illustration of Clemens faking injury during his courtship of Olivia Langdon. From ST. NICHOLAS, May 1916 |
 Mark Twain's wife Olivia with daughter Clara. Photo by Faulk Sydney, Australia, 1895. Photo from THE SKETCH, Nov. 27, 1895. |
My experience with Providence has not been
of a nature to give me great confidence in his judgment, and I consider
that my wife crept in while his attention was occupied elsewhere. - quoted in Melbourne Age, 28 October 1895 |
I have put this restraint upon me and kept it there all these years to keep
from breaking my wife's heart, whose contentment I value above the salvation
of the human race. This is a confession that in building a wall across my Nile
and damning my feelings and opinions behind it, and trying to caulk the leaks,
I am not actuated by principle, but by something much stronger -- sentiment.
... All this elaborate explanation of why I am not likely to write that book
which you speak of amounts to this, when boiled down: ninety-nine parts of me
are afraid, and my wife, who is the bulk of the remaining fraction, forbids
it.
- Letter to Carl Thalbitzer, 26 November 1902. Reprinted in Harper's Magazine,
December 2009.
She and I were really one person and there were no secrets. Sometimes I was
that person, sometimes she was that person. Sometimes it took both of us together
to constitute that person.
- Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013), p. 28. Dictated 9 April,
1906.
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