Quotation by Mark Twain

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"A Cat Tale" Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays, 1852-1890, Library of America (1992)A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)Adam, in "Wednesday" Extracts from Adam's Diary (1893)"Advice for Good Little Girls" Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays, 1852-1890, Library of America (1992)"Advice to Youth" Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays, 1852-1890, Library of America (1992)

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youth (24) death (15) love (11) wisdom (11) aging (9) memory (7) experience (6) folly (6) time (5) women (5)

I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.

Mark Twain

Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910), U.S. author. Letter, July 19, 1901. Letters of Mark Twain, ed. Albert Bigelow Paine (1917).

Refusing an invitation to attend 80th anniversary celebrations of the state of Missouri.

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