The Innocents Abroad — Volume 04
The Innocents Abroad — Volume 04
In 1867, a brash young journalist named Mark Twain boarded a steamship called the Quaker City for a Grand Holy Land Pleasure Excursion, and proceeded to revolutionize travel writing. This volume gathers his uncut dispatches from the journey, including his remarkably fresh encounter with the ruins of Pompeii, where the ancient dead still walked the streets of a city frozen in ash. Twain arrived with romantic notions of grandeur and antiquity, only to discover that the real Pompeii is stranger and more revealing than any fantasy. His accounts capture the collision between American naivety and European history, between tourist wonder and the darker truths buried beneath ancient stones. These are the raw, unedited letters, before Twain softened them for eastern audiences, containing the full force of his savage wit and elegant contempt. Here you will find the young writer who would become America's voice, already mastering the art of making the familiar strange. For readers who think they know The Innocents Abroad, this volume offers something rarer: the unvarnished Twain.
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“In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.””
— Mark Twain
“Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.””
— Mark Twain
“The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass. If the case be otherwise, I beg his pardon and extend to him the cordial hand of fellowship and call him brother. I shall always delight to meet an ass after my own heart when I have finished my travels.””
— Mark Twain
“One must travel, to learn. Every day, now, old Scriptural phrases that never possessed any significance for me before, take to themselves a meaning.””
— Mark Twain
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.””
— Mark Twain
“Memories which someday will become all beautiful when the last annoyance that encumbers them shall have faded out of our minds.””
— Mark Twain
“She kept up her compliments, and I kept up my determination to deserve them or die.””
— Mark Twain
“As far as I can see, Italy, for fifteen hundred years, has turned all her energies, all her finances, and all her industry to the building up of a vast array of wonderful church edifices, and starving half her citizens to accomplish it. She is today one vast museum of magnificence and misery. All the churches in an ordinary American city put together could hardly buy the jeweled frippery in one of her hundred cathedrals. And for every beggar in America, Italy can show a hundred - and rags and vermin to match. It is the wretchedest, princeliest land on earth. Look at the grande Doumo of Florence - a vast pile that has been sapping the purses of her citizens for five hundred years, and is not nearly finished yet. Like all other men, I fell down and worshiped it, but when the filthy beggars swarmed around me the contrast was too striking, too suggestive, and I said. "Oh, sons of classic Italy, is the spirit of enterprise, of self-reliance, of noble endeavor, utterly dead within ye? Curse your indolent worthlessness, why don't you rob your church?””
— Mark Twain
“We wish to learn all the curious, outlandish ways of all the different countries, so that we can "show off" and astonish people when we get home. We wish to excite the envy of our untraveled friends with our strange foreign fashions which we can't shake off.””
— Mark Twain
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<a href="https://lex-books.com/book/the-innocents-abroad-volume-04-766ded5b-9c73-403c-8abb-24035a40a069"><img src="https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg" alt="Read The Innocents Abroad — Volume 04 by Mark Twain free on Lex" width="160" height="40"></a>[](https://lex-books.com/book/the-innocents-abroad-volume-04-766ded5b-9c73-403c-8abb-24035a40a069)[url=https://lex-books.com/book/the-innocents-abroad-volume-04-766ded5b-9c73-403c-8abb-24035a40a069][img]https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg[/img][/url]Read The Innocents Abroad — Volume 04 by Mark Twain free on Lex: https://lex-books.com/book/the-innocents-abroad-volume-04-766ded5b-9c73-403c-8abb-24035a40a069Cite this book
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Twain, Mark. The Innocents Abroad — Volume 04. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-innocents-abroad-volume-04-766ded5b-9c73-403c-8abb-24035a40a069.Twain, M. (n.d.). The Innocents Abroad — Volume 04. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-innocents-abroad-volume-04-766ded5b-9c73-403c-8abb-24035a40a069Twain, Mark. The Innocents Abroad — Volume 04. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-innocents-abroad-volume-04-766ded5b-9c73-403c-8abb-24035a40a069.
