Narrative should flow as flows the brook down through the hills and the leafy woodlands, its course changed by every boulder it comes across and by every grass-clad gravelly spur that projects into its path; its surface broken, but its course not stayed by rocks and gravel on the bottom in the shoal places; a brook that never goes straight for a minute, but _goes_, and goes briskly, sometimes ungrammatically, and sometimes fetching a horseshoe three-quarters of a mile around, and at the end of the circuit flowing within a yard of the path it traversed an hour before; but always _going_, and always following at least one law, always loyal to that law, the law of _narrative_, which has no law. --Mark Twain

I have wanted Papa to write a book that would reveal something of his kind sympathetic nature. --Susy Clemens