Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) has often been quoted as saying: "Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it." (although it appears his collaborator on The Gilded Age, Charles Dudley Warner, actually wrote the statement). Mark definitely had some opinions about the weather and climate. The Weather Doctor presents some of these for your enjoyment.
It is your human environment that makes climate.
- Following the Equator, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar
Cold! If the thermometer had been an inch longer we'd all have frozen to death.
- Mark Twain and I, Opie Read
The captain had been telling how, in one of his Arctic voyages, it was so cold that the mate's shadow froze fast to the deck and had to be ripped loose by main strength. And even then he got only about two-thirds of it back.
- Following the Equator
In America the ice-storm is an event. And it is not an event which one is careless about. When it
comes, the news flies from room to room in the house, there are bangings on the doors, and
shoutings, "The ice-storm! the ice-storm!" and even the laziest sleepers throw off the covers and join the rush for the windows.
- Following the Equator
Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.
- Letter 8/28/1908
The lightning there is peculiar; it is so convincing, that when it strikes a thing it doesn't leave enough of that thing behind for you to tell whether -- Well, you'd think it was something valuable, and a Congressman had been there.
- "The New England Weather", Mark Twain's Speeches
The Taj has had no rival among the temples and palaces of men, none that even remotely approached it -- it was man's architectural ice-storm.
- Following the Equator
It occurs to me now that I have never seen the ice-storm put upon canvas, and have not heard that any painter has tried to do it. I wonder why that is. Is it that paint cannot counterfeit the intense blaze of a sun-flooded jewel?
- Following the Equator
The fear of lightning is one of the most distressing infirmities a human being can be afflicted with. It is mostly confined to women, but now and then you find it in a little dog, and sometimes a man.
- Mrs. McWilliams and the Lightning
The rain is famous for falling on the just and unjust alike, but if I had the management of such affairs I would rain softly and sweetly on the just, but if I caught a sample of the unjust out doors I would drown him.
- My Father Mark Twain, Clara Clemens
We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that the savage has, because we know how it is
made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.
- A Tramp Abroad
One can enjoy a rainbow without necessarily forgetting the forces that made it.
- Queen Victoria's Jubilee
Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.
- Remembered Yesterdays, Robert Johnson
Shut the door. Not that it lets in the cold but that it lets out the cozyness.
- Mark Twain's Notebook
It is better to read the weather forecast before we pray for rain.
- Notebook; More Maxims of Mark, Johnson, 1927
If you don't like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes.
- Mark Twain
The concerns of his publishing house and the enjoyment friends and club life in New York drew Twain increasingly to the city. On Saturday, March 10, 1888 a great blizzard prevented his wife
from joining him there. He wrote: "And so, after all my labor and persuasion to get you to at last promise to take a week's holiday and go off with me on a lark, this is what Providence has gone and done about it. It does seem to me the oddest thing -- the way Providence manages. A mere simple request to you to stay at home would have been entirely sufficient; but no, that is not big enough, picturesque enough -- a blizzard's the idea; pour down all the snow in stock, turn loose all the winds, bring a whole continent to a stand-still: that is Providence's idea of the correct way to trump a person's trick. If I had known it was going to make all this trouble and cost all these millions, I never would have said anything about your going. Now in the light of this revelation of the methods of Providence, consider Noah's flood -- I wish I knew the real reason for playing that cataclysm on the public: likely enough, somebody who liked dry weather wanted to take a walk. That is probably the whole thing -- and nothing more to it."
- Letter to Livy, 3/10/1888
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