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Directory of Mark Twain's maxims, quotations, and various opinions:

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ANNA DICKINSON

She talks fast, uses no notes what ever, never hesitates for a word, always gets the right word in the right place, and has the most perfect confidence in herself. Indeed, her sentences are remarkably smoothly-woven and felicitous. Her vim, her energy, her determined look, her tremendous earnestness, would compel the respect and the attention of an audience, even if she spoke in Chinese -- would convince a third of them, too, even though she used arguments that would not stand analysis. ... She will make a right venomous old maid some day, I am afraid. She said that she was arguing upon her favorite subject with a self-sufficient youth one day, and she silenced his guns one after another till at last he staked his all upon one powerful proposition: "Would you have all women strong-minded?" "No!" she thundered, "God forbid that the millions of men of your calibre that cumber the earth should be doomed to travel its weary ways unmated!"
- Letter to San Francisco Alta California, published 5 April 1867

Anna Dicksinson
Anna Dickinson portrait from Library of Congress
Prints and Photographs Division

I like Anna Dickinson, & admire her grand character, & have often & over again made her detractors feel ashamed of themselves ...
- Letter to his future wife Olivia Langdon, 22 June 1869

My what houses she used to draw! Some of you remember those determined lips and those indignant eyes, and how they used to snap and flash when she marched the platform pouring out the lava of her blistering eloquence upon the enemy.
- "Frank Fuller and My First New York Lecture," published in 2009 in Who Is Mark Twain?

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