Yay! My lady friend is coming tomorrow! Have a lot of cleaning to do. But it won't take hours, surely. She's coming at like 8pm. Should be enough time. And even if the place isn't totally clean, it's no big deal.

People talk about beautiful friendships between two persons of the same sex. What is the best of that sort, as compared with the friendship of man and wife, where the best impulses and highest ideals of both are the same. There is no place for comparison between the two friendships; the one is earthly, the other divine

-- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Mark Twain

Even if the Jews have not all been geniuses, their general average of intelligence and intellectuality is far above our general average--and that is one of our reasons for wishing to drive them out of the higher forms of business and the professions. It is the swollen envy of pigmy minds--meanness, injustice. In the case of the Negro it is of course very different. The majority of us do not like his features, or his color, and we forget to notice that his heart is often a damned sight better than ours.

-- Mark Twain

We are called the nation of inventors. And we are. We could still claim that title and wear its loftiest honors if we had stopped with the first thing we ever invented, which was human liberty.

-- Mark Twain

I feel singularly at home in this Scotch society. I have spent so much time in Scotland that everything connected with Scotland is familiar to me. Last summer I passed five weeks in that magnificent city of Edinburgh, resting. I needed rest, and I did rest. I did not know anybody. I did not take any letters of introduction at all. I simply rested and enjoyed myself. From my experience of the Scotch everything belonging to them is familiar, the language, the peculiarities of expression, even the technical things that are national, are simple household words with me. I remember when in Edinburgh I was nearly always taken for a Scotchman. Oh, yes! I had my clothes some part colored tartan, and I rather enjoyed being taken for a Scotchman. I stuck a big feather in my cap, too, and the people would follow me for miles. They thought I was a Highlander, and some of the best judges in Scotland said they had never seen a Highland costume like mine. What‘s more, one of those judges fined me for wearing it—
out of mere envy, I suppose

-- Mark Twain