On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 7:08 AM, LizR <[email protected]> wrote: > On 23 April 2014 22:29, Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Hi Liz, >> >> The "billions" make sense to me, to be honest. Even before the earth, we >> still didn't exist. It sounds like poetic liberty for "a mind blowing >> amount of time". >> > > Sure, but I think at the time "millions of years" was a mind-blowing > amount of time - actually it still is - and it would appear the comment > doesn't have any known source. So although I'd be happily proved wrong on > this, it just feels a bit anachronistic for Samuel Clemens. Maybe just my > personal bias. >
The people at the snopes board did some looking around for the quote at http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=81874 and couldn't find any appearances before 2002, so it's probably not a real quote. However, they did turn up the following quote from Twain's autobiography which the fake quote was probably a paraphrase of: "Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born—a hundred million years—and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together." see http://harpers.org/blog/2008/03/no-terrors-for-me/ for confirmation. Jesse -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
