Huckleberry Finn Quotes

“Because Mary Jane ‘ll be in mourning from this out; and first you know the n***** that does up the rooms will get an order to box these duds up and put ’em away; and do you reckon a n***** can run across money and not borrow some of it?”

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 26. The Duke is saying that Mary Jane’s slave will steal all of the money if he finds it because all black people are thieves. Hypocritically the Duke and King make their living by scamming people out of money.

I tucked the money bag under the lid, just down beyond where his hands was crossed, which made me creep, they was so cold, and then I ran back across the room and in behind the door.

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 27. On hearing footsteps, Huck stashes the money he is stealing back from the Duke and King in the nearest hiding place – the coffin. Huck tricks the con duo by using “immoral” actions, but it is done for the greater good to return the money to Mary Jane and her family.

So she done it. And it was the n*****s – I just expected it. She said the beautiful trip to England was most about spoiled for her; she didn’t know HOW she was ever going to be happy there, knowing the mother and the children warn’t ever going to see each other no more – and then busted out bitterer than ever, and flung up her hands.

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 28. Mary Jane Wilks is distressed over the separation of the slave family. Apart from Huck, she seems to be the only other white person in the book who is able to see black people as having the same feelings as white people.

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.

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 28. Mary Jane is crying because in selling the Wilks’s slaves, the Duke and King separated a mother from her children. Moved by her tears, Huck blurts out that the family will be reunited in two weeks, and reveals that the Duke and King are not her uncles but a couple of frauds.

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.

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 28. Huck on Mary Jane Wilks, who is so moved by Huck’s admission about the conmen duo and him helping her, that she promises to pray for him. The quote is an allusion to Judas Iscariot, the disciple who betrayed Christ in the Bible. Huck feels he is a Judas to society for helping slave Jim escape.

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. I had to skip around a bit, and jump and crack my heels a few times, I couldn’t help it; but about the third crack, I noticed a sound that I knowed mighty well – and held my breath and listened and waited – and sure enough, when the next flash busted out over the water, here they come! – and just a laying to their oars and making their skiff hum! It was the king and the duke.

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 29. Huck after helping expose the swindlers the Duke and King and escaping from them on the raft with Jim. But this time the Mississippi no longer symbolizes freedom for Huck and Jim, as the con duo catch up with them in a small boat.

First they done a lecture on temperance; but they didn’t make enough for them both to get drunk on. Then in another village they started a dancing-school; but they didn’t know no more how to dance than a kangaroo does…They tackled missionarying, and mesmerizing, and doctoring, and telling fortunes, and a little of everything; but they couldn’t seem to have no luck.

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 31. The two conmen, the King and Duke, travel from place to place trying on their scams but don’t have much luck making money.

So me and the duke went up to the village, and hunted around there for the king, and by and by we found him in the back room of a little low doggery, very tight, and a lot of loafers bullyragging him for sport, and he a-cussing and a-threatening with all his might, and so tight he couldn’t walk, and couldn’t do nothing to them. The duke he begun to abuse him for an old fool, and the king begun to sass back, and the minute they was fairly at it I lit out and shook the reefs out of my hind legs, and spun down the river road like a deer, for I see our chance; and I made up my mind that it would be a long day before they ever see me and Jim again.

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 31. Huck takes advantage of the King’s drinking to escape from him and his fellow conman the Duke.

Once I said to myself it would be a thousand times better for Jim to be a slave at home where his family was, as long as he’d got to be a slave, and so I’d better write a letter to Tom Sawyer and tell him to tell Miss Watson where he was. But I soon give up that notion for two things: she’d be mad and disgusted at his rascality and ungratefulness for leaving her, and so she’d sell him straight down the river again; and if she didn’t, everybody naturally despises an ungrateful n*****, and they’d make Jim feel it all the time, and so he’d feel ornery and disgraced.

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 31. Huck wrestles with his conscience over the fate of runaway slave Jim, who has been sold back into captivity by the two conmen.

But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. 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; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the ONLY one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 31. Huck agonizes over whether he should turn in the fugitive slave Jim, as society’s rules demand he should. He tries to come up with something that will “harden” him against the runaway. But his bond of friendship with Jim is so strong and deep, he cannot.

I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
“All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” – and tore it up.

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 31. Huck faces a moral dilemma. He realises the Duke and Dauphin have betrayed and sold runaway slave Jim into captivity. If he stands idly by Jim will be transported back to Miss Watson. At first Huck writes a letter to warn Miss Watson, but then decides to tear it up and save Jim. He cannot go along with what he has always been taught, that the slave is property. So he goes against the teaching of his church, elders, and society.

“Blamed if I know – that is, what’s become of the raft. That old fool had made a trade and got forty dollars, and when we found him in the doggery the loafers had matched half-dollars with him and got every cent but what he’d spent for whisky; and when I got him home late last night and found the raft gone, we said, ‘That little rascal has stole our raft and shook us, and run off down the river.'”

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 31. The Duke speaking about the King, who as soon as he gets his hands on money drinks it away. Much like Huck’s father Pap.

When I got there it was all still and Sunday-like, 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.

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 32. When Huck comes across the Phelps farm he gets a sense of spirits whispering and a Sunday-like feeling. Huck believes that religion is not just found in church, but can be found anywhere you want it to be found.

She grabbed me and hugged me tight; and then gripped me by both hands, and shook and shook; and the tears come in her eyes, and run down over; and she couldn’t seem to hug and shake enough, and kept saying, “You don’t look as much like your mother as I reckoned you would; but law sakes, I don’t care for that, I’m so glad to see you! Dear, dear, it does seem like I could eat you up! Children, it’s your cousin Tom! – tell him howdy.”

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 32. Aunt Sally, Tom’s gullible and lovable aunt, welcomes Huck with open arms, thinking he is Tom. – and Huck keeps up the pretence that he is her nephew.

“It warn’t the grounding – that didn’t keep us back but a little. We blowed out a cylinder-head.”
“Good gracious! anybody hurt?”
“No’m. Killed a n*****.”
“Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 32. Huck lies to Aunt Sally about an explosion on a steamship. Her reaction to a black man being killed reflects the fact that the society in which she lives does not consider the death of a black man important. Upstanding, church-going and caring she may be, but her reaction illustrates the hypocricy of societal mores at the time.

Well, I let go all holts then, like I was shot. It was the most astonishing speech I ever heard – and I’m bound to say Tom Sawyer fell considerable in my estimation. Only I couldn’t believe it. Tom Sawyer a n*****-stealer!

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 33. When Tom enthusiastically agrees to help in the freeing of Jim, Huck is completely confused. Tom is not the sort to sacrifice his reputation by helping a slave escape. But unknownst to Huck, Tom is aware that Jim has already been legally freed by Miss Watson so “stealing” Jim is just another boyhood game to Tom.
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