| The Columbia World of Quotations. 1996. |
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| NUMBER: | 61887 |
| QUOTATION: | Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth. |
| ATTRIBUTION: | Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910), U.S. author. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, ch. 22 (1889).
Twain’s bewilderment with the German language was a recurring subject: it is “the language which enables a man to travel all day in one sentence without changing cars.” Speakng the language was the main difficulty: “I can understand German as well as the maniac that invented it, but I talk it best through an interpreter.” (Quoted in Greatly Exaggerated, ed. Alex Ayres, 1988). |
| BIOGRAPHY: | Columbia Encyclopedia. |
| WORKS: | Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] Collection. |
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| | | The Columbia World of Quotations. Copyright © 1996 Columbia University Press. |
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