The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (also simply known as Tom Sawyer) is an 1876 novel by Mark Twain about a boy, Tom Sawyer, growing up along the Mississippi River. It is set in the 1840s in the town of St. Petersburg, which is based on Hannibal, Missouri, where Twain lived as a boy. In the novel, Sawyer has several adventures, often with his friend Huckleberry Finn. Initially a commercial failure, the book ended up being the best-selling of Twain's works during his lifetime. Though overshadowed by its 1884 sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the book is considered by many to be a masterpiece of American literature. It is alleged by Mark Twain to be one of the first novels to be written on a typewriter.

Quotes

Chapter 1

• He was not the Model Boy of the village. He knew the model boy very well though—and loathed him.

Chapter 2

• Saturday morning was come, and all the summer world was bright and fresh, and brimming with life. There was a song in every heart; and if the heart was young the music issued at the lips. There was cheer in every face and a spring in every step. The locust-trees were in bloom and the fragrance of the blossoms filled the air. Cardiff Hill, beyond the village and above it, was green with vegetation and it lay just far enough away to seem a Delectable Land, dreamy, reposeful, and inviting.

• Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden.

• He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it — namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to obtain.

• If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

Chapter 4

• “Answer the gentleman, Thomas—don’t be afraid.”
  Tom still hung fire.
  “Now I know you’ll tell me,” said the lady. “The names of the first two disciples were—”
  “David and Goliah!”
  Let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of the scene.

Chapter 5

• Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.

• The minister gave out his text and droned along monotonously through an argument that was so prosy that many a head by and by began to nod — and yet it was an argument that dealt in limitless fire and brimstone and thinned the predestined elect down to a company so small as to be hardly worth the saving.

Chapter 6

• “What’s your name?”
  “Becky Thatcher. What’s yours? Oh, I know. It’s Thomas Sawyer.”
  “That’s the name they lick me by. I’m Tom when I’m good.”

Chapter 8

• Ah, if he could only die temporarily!

• They said they would rather be outlaws a year in Sherwood Forest than President of the United States forever.

Chapter 13

• There was no getting around the stubborn fact that taking sweetmeats was only "hooking," while taking bacon and hams and such valuables was plain simple stealing — and there was a command against that in the Bible. So they inwardly resolved that so long as they remained in the business, their piracies should not again be sullied with the crime of stealing.

Chapter 14

• A brown spotted lady-bug climbed the dizzy height of a grass blade, and Tom bent down close to it and said, “Lady-bug, lady-bug, fly away home, your house is on fire, your children’s alone,” and she took wing and went off to see about it—which did not surprise the boy, for he knew of old that this insect was credulous about conflagrations, and he had practised upon its simplicity more than once.

Chapter 20

• What a curious kind of a fool a girl is! Never been licked in school! Shucks! What’s a licking! That’s just like a girl—they’re so thin-skinned and chicken-hearted.

• Girls’ faces always tell on them. They ain’t got any backbone.

Chapter 21

• Homely truth is unpalatable.

Chapter 22

• To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.

Chapter 25

• Huck was always willing to take a hand in any enterprise that offered entertainment and required no capital, for he had a troublesome superabundance of that sort of time which is not money.

Chapter 29

• “Kill? Who said anything about killing? I would kill him if he was here; but not her. When you want to get revenge on a woman you don’t kill her—bosh! you go for her looks. You slit her nostrils—you notch her ears like a sow!”

Chapter 35

• She makes me get up just at the same time every morning; she makes me wash, they comb me all to thunder; she won't let me sleep in the woodshed; I got to wear them blamed clothes that just smothers me, Tom; they don't seem to let any air git through 'em, somehow; and they're so rotten nice that I can't set down, nor lay down, nor roll around anywher's; I hain't slid on a cellar-door for — well, it 'pears to be years; I got to go to church and sweat and sweat — I hate them ornery sermons! I can't ketch a fly in there, I can't chaw. I got to wear shoes all Sunday. The widder eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she gits up by a bell — everything's so awful reg'lar a body can't stand it.

Conclusion

• When one writes a novel about grown people, he knows exactly where to stop—that is, with a marriage; but when he writes of juveniles, he must stop where he best can.