Mark Twain quote about goodness from Life on the Mississippi - now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.
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now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.
 Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883). copy citation

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Author Mark Twain
Source Life on the Mississippi
Topic goodness aspirations
Date 1883
Language English
Reference
Note
Weblink http://www.gutenberg.org/files/245/245-h/245-h.htm

Context

“WHEN I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village {footnote [1. Hannibal, Missouri]} on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboatman. We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient. When a circus came and went, it left us all burning to become clowns; the first negro minstrel show that came to our section left us all suffering to try that kind of life; now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates. These ambitions faded out, each in its turn; but the ambition to be a steamboatman always remained.
Once a day a cheap, gaudy packet arrived upward from St. Louis, and another downward from Keokuk.” source

Meaning and analysis

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