Huckleberry Finn Quotes

“Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.”

“Jim said that bees won’t sting idiots, but I didn’t believe that, because I tried them lots of times myself and they wouldn’t sting me.”

“I couldn’t bear to think about it; and yet, somehow, I couldn’t think about nothing else.”

“What’s the use you learning to do right when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?”

“Stars and shadows ain’t good to see by.”

“You can’t pray a lie – I found that out.”

“I don’t want no better book than what your face is.”

“All kings is mostly rapscallions, as fur as I can make out.”

“All right then, I’ll go to hell”

Tom told me what his plan was, and I see in a minute it was worth fifteen of mine for style, and would make Jim just as free a man as mine would, and maybe get us all killed besides. So I was satisfied, and said we would waltz in on it.

“I was mighty down-hearted; so I made up my mind I wouldn’t ever go anear that house again, because I reckoned I was to blame, somehow.”

“That’s just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don’t want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide it, it ain’t no disgrace. That was my fix exactly.”

“I knowed very well why [the words] wouldn’t come. It was because my heart warn’t right; it was because I warn’t square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all.”

“Well, everybody does it that way, Huck.” “Tom, I am not everybody.”

“Huckleberry was cordially hated and dreaded by all the mothers of the town because he was idle, and lawless, and vulgar, and bad - and because all their children admired him so, and delighted in his forbidden society, and wished they dared to be like him.”

“That is just the way with some people. They get down on a thing when they don’t know nothing about it.”

“Look here, if you’re telling the truth you needn’t be afraid--nobody’ll hurt you.”

“It’s the little things that smooths people’s roads the most.”

“A person’s conscience ain’t got no sense, and just goes for him anyway.”

“There warn’t anybody at the church, except maybe a hog or two, for there warn’t any lock on the door, and hogs likes a puncheon floor in summer-time because it’s cool. If you notice, most folks don’t go to church only when they’ve got to: but a hog is different.”

″‘Hucky, do you believe the dead people like it for us to be here?’ ‘I wisht I knowed. It’s awful solemn like, _ain’t_ it?‘”

“And the two clung together with beating hearts.”

“Tom, we got to keep mum. You know that. That Injun devil wouldn’t make any more of drownding us than a couple of cats, if we was to squeak ‘bout this and they didn’t hang him. Now, look-a-here, Tom, less take and swear to one another—that’s what we got to do—swear to keep mum.”

The spirit of adventure rose in the boys’ souls once more.

Then Huckleberry and Tom stood dumb and staring, and heard the stony-hearted liar reel off his serene statement, they expecting every moment that the clear sky would deliver God’s lightnings upon his head, and wondering to see how long the stroke was delayed.

And when he had finished and still stood alive and whole, their wavering impulse to break their oath and save the poor betrayed prisoner’s life faded and vanished away, for plainly this miscreant had sold himself to Satan and it would be fatal to meddle with the property of such a power as that.

″‘Tom Sawyer, the Black Avenger of the Spanish Main. Name your names.’ ‘Huck Finn the Red-Handed, and Joe Harper the Terror of the Seas.‘”

“anyways, I’m suited. I don’t want nothing better’n this. I don’t ever get enough to eat, gen’ally—and here they can’t come and pick at a feller and bullyrag him so.”

“Well, we’ll let the crybaby go home to his mother, won’t we, Huck? Poor thing—does it want to see its mother? And so it shall. You like it here, don’t you, Huck? We’ll stay, won’t we?”

“Talk? Well, it’ís just Muff Potter, Muff Potter, Muff Potter all the time. It keeps me in a sweat, constant, so’s I want to hide som’ers.”

“Most always—most always. He ain’t no account; but then he hain’t ever done anything to hurt anybody. Just fishes a little, to get money to get drunk on—and loafs around considerable; but lord, we all do that—leastways most of us—preachers and such like. But he’s kind of good—he give me half a fish, once, when there warn’t enough for two; and lots of times he’s kind of stood by me when I was out of luck.”

“You’ve been mighty good to me, boys—better’n anybody else in this town. And I don’t forget it, I don’t. Often I says to myself, says I, ‘I used to mend all the boys’ kites and things, and show ‘em where the good fishin’ places was, and befriend ‘em what I could, and now they’ve all forgot old Muff when he’s in trouble; but Tom don’t, and Huck don’t—_they_ don’t forget him,’ says I, ‘and I don’t forget them.‘”

“Tom, I don’t like to fool around much where there’s dead people. A body’s bound to get into trouble with ‘em, sure.”

“My boy, don’t be afraid of me. I wouldn’t hurt a hair of your head for all the world. No—I’d protect you—I’d protect you.”

“Poor Huck was too distressed to smile, but the old man laughed loud and joyously, shook up the details of his anatomy from head to foot, and ended by saying that such a laugh was money in a-man’s pocket, because it cut down the doctor’s bill like everything.”

″‘Earnest, Huck—just as earnest as ever I was in my life. Will you go in there with me and help get it out?’ ‘I bet I will! I will if it’s where we can blaze our way to it and not get lost’.”

″‘Why, it’s real bully, Tom. I believe it’s better’n to be a pirate.’ ‘Yes, it’s better in some ways, because it’s close to home and circuses and all that.‘”

“Huck’s got money. Maybe you don’t believe it, but he’s got lots of it. Oh, you needn’t smile—I reckon I can show you. You just wait a minute.”

“I got to go to church and sweat and sweat—I hate them ornery sermons!”

“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.”

“The widder wouldn’t let me smoke; she wouldn’t let me yell, she wouldn’t let me gape, nor stretch, nor scratch, before folks—”

“Looky-here, Tom, being rich ain’t what it’s cracked up to be. It’s just worry and worry, and sweat and sweat, and a-wishing you was dead all the time.”

″‘Oh, Huck, you know I can’t do that. ‘Tain’t fair; and besides if you’ll try this thing just a while longer you’ll come to like it.’ ‘Like it! Yes—the way I’d like a hot stove if I was to set on it long enough.‘”

“The widow she cried over me, and called me a poor lost lamb, and she called me a lot of other names, too, but she never meant no harm by it. She put me in them new clothes again, and I couldn’t do nothing but sweat and sweat, and feel all cramped up.”

“Here she was a-bothering about Moses, which was no kin to her, and no use to anybody, being gone, you see, yet finding a power of fault with me for doing a thing that had some good in it.”

“If you are with the quality, or at a funeral, or trying to go to sleep when you ain’t sleepy—if you are anywheres where it won’t do for you to scratch, why you will itch all over in upwards of a thousand places.”

“They talked it over, and they was going to rule me out, because they said every boy must have a family or somebody to kill, or else it wouldn’ t be fair and square for the others.”

“Kill the women? No; nobody ever saw anything in the books like that. You fetch them to the cave, and you’re always as polite as pie to them; and by-and-by they fall in love with you, and never want to go home any more.”

“I says to myself, if a body can get anything they pray for, why don’t Deacon Winn get back the money he lost on pork? Why can’t the widow get back her silver snuffbox that was stole? Why can’t Miss Watson fat up?”

“Shucks, it ain’t no use to talk to you, Huck Finn. You don’t seem to know anything, somehow—perfect saphead.”

“I had been to school most all the time and could spell and read and write just a little, and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don’t reckon I could ever get any further than that if I was to live forever.”

“I liked the old ways best, but I was getting so I liked the new ones, too, a little bit.”

“You think you’re better’n your father, now, don’t you, because he can’t?”

“So there ain’t no doubt but there is something in that thing—that is, there’s something in it when a body like the widow or the parson prays, but it don’t work for me, and I reckon it don’t work for only just the right kind.”

“but by-and-by it got sort of lonesome, and so I went and set on the bank and listened to the current swashing along, and counted the stars and drift logs and rafts that come down, and then went to bed; there ain’nt no better way to put in time when you are lonesome; you can’t stay so, you soon get over it.”

“Now you think it’s bad luck; but what did you say when I fetched in the snake-skin that I found on the top of the ridge day before yesterday? You said it was the worst bad luck in the world to touch a snake-skin with my hands. Well, here’s your bad luck! We’ve raked in all this truck and eight dollars besides. I wish we could have some bad luck like this every day, Jim.”

“No, you won’t. Set down and stay where you are. I ain’t going to hurt you, and I ain’t going to tell on you, nuther. You just tell me your secret, and trust me. I’ll keep it; and, what’s more, I’ll help you. So’ll my old man if you want him to. You see, you’re a runaway ‘prentice, that’s all. It ain’t anything. There ain’t no harm in it. You’ve been treated bad, and you made up your mind to cut. Bless you, child, I wouldn’t tell on you. Tell me all about it now, that’s a good boy.”

“It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn’ t ever feel like talking loud, and it warn’t often that we laughed—only a little kind of a low chuckle.”

“Pap always said, take a chicken when you get a chance, because if you don’t want him yourself you can easy find somebody that does, and a good deed ain’t ever forgot.”

“Pap always said it warn’t no harm to borrow things if you was meaning to pay them back some time; but the widow said it warn’t anything but a soft name for stealing, and no decent body would do it. Jim said he reckoned the widow was partly right and pap was partly right;”

“I says to myself, there ain’t no telling but I might come to be a murderer myself yet, and then how would I like it?”

“I wished the widow knowed about it. I judged she would be proud of me for helping these rapscallions, because rapscallions and dead beats is the kind the widow and good people takes the most interest in.”

“I told Jim all about what happened inside the wreck and at the ferry-boat, and I said these kinds of things was adventures; but he said he didn’t want no more adventures.”

“And ain’t it natural and right for a cat and a cow to talk different from us?” “Why, mos’ sholy it is.” “Well, then, why ain’t it natural and right for a Frenchman to talk different from us? You answer me that.”

“Goodness gracious, is dat you, Huck? En you ain’ dead—you ain’ drownded—you’ s back agin? It’ s too good for true, honey, it’ s too good for true. Lemme look at you chile, lemme feel o’ you. No, you ain’ dead! you’ s back agin, ‘live en soun’, jis de same ole Huck—de same ole Huck, thanks to goodness!”

“They went off and I got aboard the raft, feeling bad and low, because I knowed very well I had done wrong, and I see it warn’t no use for me to try to learn to do right; a body that don’t get started right when he’s little ain’t got no show—when the pinch comes there ain’t nothing to back him up and keep him to his work, and so he gets beat.”

“We didn’t say a word for a good while. There warn’t anything to say. We both knowed well enough it was some more work of the rattlesnake-skin; so what was the use to talk about it? It would only look like we was finding fault, and that would be bound to fetch more bad luck—-and keep on fetching it, too, till we knowed enough to keep still.”

“We said there warn’t no home like a raft, after all.”

“You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.”

“We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened.”

“He said we ought to bow when we spoke to him, and say “Your Grace,” or “My Lord,” or “Your Lordship”— and he wouldn’t mind it if we called him plain “Bridgewater,” which, he said, was a title anyway, and not a name; and one of us ought to wait on him at dinner, and do any little thing for him he wanted done.”

“So Jim and me set to majestying him, and doing this and that and t’other for him, and standing up till he told us we might set down. This done him heaps of good, and so he got cheerful and comfortable.”

“It didn’t take me long to make up my mind that these liars warn’t no kings nor dukes at all, but just low-down humbugs and frauds. But I never said nothing, never let on; kept it to myself; it’s the best way; then you don’t have no quarrels, and don’t get into no trouble.”

“If I never learnt nothing else out of pap, I learnt that the best way to get along with his kind of people is to let them have their own way.”

“I ain’t opposed to spending money on circuses when there ain’t no other way, but there ain’t no use in wasting it on them.”

“My, you ought to seen old Henry the Eight when he was in bloom. He was a blossom. He used to marry a new wife every day, and chop off her head next morning. And he would do it just as indifferent as if he was ordering up eggs.”

“The king’s duds was all black, and he did look real swell and starchy. I never knowed how clothes could change a body before. Why, before, he looked like the orneriest old rip that ever was; but now, when he’d take off his new white beaver and make a bow and do a smile, he looked that grand and good and pious that you’d say he had walked right out of the ark, and maybe was old Leviticus himself.”

“Then he turns around, blubbering, and makes a lot of idiotic signs to the duke on his hands, and blamed if he didn’t drop a carpet-bag and bust out a-crying. If they warn’t the beatenest lot, them two frauds, that ever I struck.”

“Well, the men gathered around and sympathized with them, and said all sorts of kind things to them, and carried their carpet-bags up the hill for them, and let them lean on them and cry, and told the king all about his brother’s last moments, and the king he told it all over again on his hands to the duke, and both of them took on about that dead tanner like they’d lost the twelve disciples.”

“I felt so ornery and low down and mean that I says to myself, my mind’s made up; I’ll hive that money for them or bust.”

“Blame it, I says, I might get hunted up and jailed; I’d better lay low and keep dark, and not write at all; the thing’s awful mixed now; trying to better it, I’ve worsened it a hundred times, and I wish to goodness I’d just let it alone, dad fetch the whole business!”

“Them poor things was that glad and happy it made my heart ache to see them getting fooled and lied to so,”

“Miss Mary Jane, you can’t a-bear to see people in trouble, and I can’t—most always. Tell me about it.”

“I says to myself, I reckon a body that ups and tells the truth when he is in a tight place is taking considerable many resks, though I ain’t had no experience, and can’t say for certain; but it looks so to me, anyway; and yet here’s a case where I’m blest if it don’t look to me like the truth is better and actuly safer than a lie.”

“I got to tell the truth, and you want to brace up, Miss Mary, because it’s a bad kind, and going to be hard to take, but there ain’t no help for it. These uncles of yourn ain’t no uncles at all; they’re a couple of frauds—regular dead-beats.”

“Oh, stop blaming yourself—it’s too bad to do it, and I won’t allow it—you couldn’t help it; it wasn’t your fault. Where did you hide it?”

“Pray for me! I reckoned if she knowed me she’d take a job that was more nearer her size. But I bet she done it, just the same—she was just that kind. She had the grit to pray for Judus if she took the notion—there warn’t no back-down to her, I judge.”

“I hain’t ever seen her since that time that I see her go out of that door; no, I hain’t ever seen her since, but I reckon I’ve thought of her a many and a many a million times, and of her saying she would pray for me; and if ever I’d a thought it would do any good for me to pray for her, blamed if I wouldn’t a done it or bust.”

“The duke he never let on he suspicioned what was up, but just went a goo-gooing around, happy and satisfied, like a jug that’s googling out buttermilk; and as for the king, he just gazed and gazed down sorrowful on them new-comers like it give him the stomach-ache in his very heart to think there could be such frauds and rascals in the world.”

“So in two seconds away we went a-sliding down the river, and it did seem so good to be free again and all by ourselves on the big river, and nobody to bother us.”

“Set her loose, Jim! we’re all right now! But there warn’t no answer, and nobody come out of the wigwam. Jim was gone! I set up a shout—and then another—and then another one; and run this way and that in the woods, whooping and screeching; but it warn’t no use—old Jim was gone.”

“After all this long journey, and after all we’d done for them scoundrels, here it was all come to nothing, everything all busted up and ruined, because they could have the heart to serve Jim such a trick as that, and make him a slave again all his life, and amongst strangers, too, for forty dirty dollars.”

“It made me shiver. And I about made up my mind to pray, and see if I couldn’t try to quit being the kind of a boy I was and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn’t come. Why wouldn’t they?”

“I knowed very well why they wouldn’t come. It was because my heart warn’t right; it was because I warn’t square; it was because I was playing double.”

“I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all.”

“Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather right straight off, and my troubles all gone.”

“I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now.”

“And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing.”

“I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ‘stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was;”

“I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a- trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it.”

“When I got there it was all still and Sunday-ike, and hot and sunshiny; the hands was gone to the fields; and there was them kind of faint dronings of bugs and flies in the air that makes it seem so lonesome and like everybody’s dead and gone; and if a breeze fans along and quivers the leaves it makes you feel mournful, because you feel like it’s spirits whispering—spirits that’ s been dead ever so many years—and you always think they’re talking about you. As a general thing it makes a body wish he was dead, too, and done with it all.”

“But that’s always the way; it don’t make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person’s conscience ain’t got no sense, and just goes for him anyway.”

“So it was—I noticed it. Well, it does beat all that I never thought about a dog not eating watermelon. It shows how a body can see and don’t see at the same time.”

“And it didn’t. He told me what it was, and I see in a minute it was worth fifteen of mine for style, and would make Jim just as free a man as mine would, and maybe get us all killed besides.”

“I couldn’t understand it no way at all. It was outrageous, and I knowed I ought to just up and tell him so; and so be his true friend, and let him quit the thing right where he was and save himself.”

″‘That’s all he said, and that’s all I said. It warn’t no use to say any more; because when he said he’d do a thing, he always done it. But I couldn’t make out how he was willing to go into this thing; so I just let it go, and never bothered no more about it. If he was bound to have it so, I couldn’t help it.”

“Huck, you don’t ever seem to want to do anything that’s regular; you want to be starting something fresh all the time.”

“Picks is the thing, moral or no moral; and as for me, I don’t care shucks for the morality of it, nohow.”

“But the person that et it would want to fetch a couple of kags of toothpicks along, for if that rope ladder wouldn’t cramp him down to business I don’t know nothing what I’m talking about, and lay him in enough stomach-ache to last him till next time, too.”

“Now, old Jim, you’re a free man again, and I bet you won’t ever be a slave no more.”

“And twice I went down the rod away in the night, and slipped around front, and see her setting there by her candle in the window with her eyes towards the road and the tears in them; and I wished I could do something for her, but I couldn’t, only to swear that I wouldn’t never do nothing to grieve her any more.”

“No, I ain’nt out of my HEAD; I know all what I’m talking about. We did set him free—me and Tom. We laid out to do it, and we done it. And we done it elegant, too.”

“Well, I never heard the likes of it in all my born days! So it was you, you little rapscallions, that’s been making all this trouble, and turned everybody’s wits clean inside out and scared us all most to death. I’ve as good a notion as ever I had in my life to take it out o’ you this very minute. To think, here I’ve been, night after night, a—you just get well once, you young scamp, and I lay I’ll tan the Old Harry out o’ both o’ ye!”

“They hain’nt no right to shut him up! Shove!—and don’t you lose a minute. Turn him loose! he ain’t no slave; he’s as free as any cretur that walks this earth!”

“I mean every word I say, Aunt Sally, and if somebody don’nt go, I’ll go. I’ve knowed him all his life, and so has Tom, there. Old Miss Watson died two months ago, and she was ashamed she ever was going to sell him down the river, and said so; and she set him free in her will.”

“Tom’s most well now, and got his bullet around his neck on a watch-guard for a watch, and is always seeing what time it is, and so there ain’t nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I’d a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t a tackled it, and ain’t a-going to no more.”