The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Huckleberry Finn Quotes

"Say, Huck, if we find a treasure here, what you going to do with your share?"

"Well, I'll have pie and a glass of soda every day, and I'll go to every circus that comes along. I bet I'll have a gay time."

"What you going to do with yourn, Tom?"

"I'm going to buy a new drum, and a sure-'nough sword, and a red necktie and a bull pup, and get married." (25.48-9; 53-4)

The childishness of Tom's dream is only emphasized by his inclusion of marriage in what is otherwise a rather silly list of desires.

"Tom, I wouldn't ever got into all this trouble if it hadn't 'a' ben for that money; now you just take my sheer of it along with your'n, and gimme a ten-center sometimes -- not many times, becuz I don't give a dern for a thing 'thout it's tollable hard to git -- and you go and beg off for me with the widder." (35.9)

Huck finds out that, sometimes, getting just what you had hoped for is actually the last thing you ever want.

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."

"Well, everybody does that way, Huck." (35.7-8)

The Widow's regimen, and, most especially, Tom's defense of it, seems curiously at odds with the vision of boyhood, of specifically American boyhood, that Tom has come to represent.