Mark Twain Quotes

I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron.... I should have been able to do better.

I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.

We all have appointments with the past.

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood. . . .

I must be getting absent-minded. Whenever I complain that things aren't what they used to be, I always forget to include myself.

All my years to this moment All my roads to this wall. All my words to this silence All my pride to this fall. -Songs of Sapphique

Wasting time just going mindless, watching your charades. When you were younger, did it occur to you 10 years from then you'd act the same age?

It gave me a strange feeling, and the rest of that night I didn’t say much, but merely sat there and drank, trying to decide if I was getting older and wiser, or just plain old.

I'm not sure whether I've been happy. After my last book tour, I sat on my balcony with a cup of tea. I thought: 'You can't rewind the movie. I've spent more than half my life in the Middle East. There have been great moments of horror and depression and loneliness.'

I'm a grown man. You know, I've been in a lot of scrapes, but I never felt like I got so - there are probably a lot of things I should have done that I didn't do.

I learned from my past.

I hate looking backward, but every once in a while it sneaks up on you.

I have a tendency to go through my life at full speed and as a one-man band, and so I don't generally stop and take in other people enough to develop many relationships. I'm starting to regret that a bit. I want to change it.

We were younger. And it's basically like looking at football classics. You see things that you did, you see things that you could've done better and you think about all the good relationships that you had with the cast.

To me, it's always interesting to see what people end up regretting, as a way maybe to avoid such regrets in your own life.

Sometimes I lie awake at night, and ask, 'Where have I gone wrong?' Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.'

I think it's natural as you get to the end of your twenties to start thinking about what you could have done differently - whether they went well or whether they went terribly.

I think sometimes in life we rush and only later look back and say, 'Wow, that was something pretty cool that I did,' and we realize we should have been more aware while it was happening.

It's hard to watch something you've done many years ago.

I realized I've spent all my life creating a past.

I've certainly had a lot of experiences in my life where I was much too self-centered.

Maybe one day I can have a reunion with myself.

I like to read my diary occasionally to remind myself what a miserable, alienated old sod I used to be.

I'm not a great one for looking back.

I find myself thinking more about the past as I get older... maybe because there's just more of it to think about. At the same time, I'm less haunted by it than I was as a younger person. I guess that's probably the ideal: to reach a point where you have access to all of your memories, but you don't feel victimized by them.