A boy's life is not all comedy; much of the tragic enters into it.
 Mark Twain, Chapters from My Autobiography (1906). copy citation

add
Author Mark Twain
Source Chapters from My Autobiography
Topic comedy life
Date 1906
Language English
Reference
Note
Weblink http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19987/19987-h/19987-h.htm

Context

“When he had been teaching me twice a day for three weeks I introduced a new gymnastic—one that he had never seen before—and so at last a compliment was wrung from him, a thing which I had been risking my life for days to achieve. He gathered me up and said mournfully: "Mr. Clemens, you can fall off a bicycle in more different ways than any person I ever saw before." (1849.) A boy's life is not all comedy; much of the tragic enters into it. The drunken tramp—mentioned in "Tom Sawyer" or "Huck Finn"—who was burned up in the village jail, lay upon my conscience a hundred nights afterward and filled them with hideous dreams—dreams in which I saw his appealing face as I had seen it in the pathetic reality, pressed against the window-bars, with the red hell glowing behind him—a” source