And I’ve bookmarked her.
It might be the most unlikely attribution I’ve ever seen (apart from jokes.) But it is very wide-spread and I couldn’t find a Snopes-style debunking. 485,000 Google hits for “Twain Kiss Slowly”.
And yeah Mr.** Gyrate**, proving a negative is tough. I’m not familiar with the resources for finding the earliest printed uses of expressions, but was hoping someone might be able to discover that there’s no reference for some part of that glurge before, say, 1982.
A quick search finds this attributed to Twain on a website as early as 2008 (which predates the Coelho book by 6 years). It doesn’t sound even remotely like anything Twain would have or could have said. It’s as absurd as Sarah Palin attributing a quote about playing nicely to Socrates.
Google N-gram has nothing on this quote.
http://forum.quoteland.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/99191541/m/3541012171
I’ve found quite a few uses of this as a sig line from 2005:
assuming that the sig lines aren’t automatically updated when the user changes them (which may actually be the case), I’ve got at least three uses from vack then.
Here’s a citation from 2005 (the sig line at the bottom of the first box), but it doesn’t atribute the quote to Twain. It’s the earliest use of it I’ve thus far found.
To be fair, they’re both dead.
Here’s a book that attributes the quote to Mae West
Women and Positive Aging: An International Perspective
By Lisa Hollis-Sawyer, Amanda Dykema-Engblade
(2016)
p. 204
The book is copyrighted this year, though (!). attributions to Twain go back to at least 2008.
This book attributes it to “unknown” on p. 81
Quote This!: A Collection of Illustrated Quotes for Educators
By Diane Hodges (2008)
I can’t find it through Google Books before 2006.
It gives a 2001 date to a Facebook post by Kevin Spacey (who attributes it to Twain) but if you check it was actually made in 2013.
Sig lines and post counts are automatically updated. Looking at that forum’s front page I found the same sig and post count for bikerbraid as late as 2010. You’d have to find a contemporary cache to know what the sig was in 2005.
A quick search of Google Books turns up nothing as early as even 2000, attributed to anybody.
On the other hand, this e-book from 2014 actually attributes it to Twain, along with a lot of other questionable quotations.
Aha! – here’s the thread about the Plato quote. It’s from 2010, and my comments and the quote start on entry #41:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=559832&highlight=Palin+Plato
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and internet quotes.” - Disraeli
“A fourth kind. Anything said by Disraeli.” - Gladstone
Just came across this quote attributed to Mark Twain that resembles the one in the OP:
1.) Granted, it does more closely resemble a Twain quote than the original
2.) Although I’ve read a LOT of Twain, I don’t recall this
3.) Your quote is missing a key ingredient – a cite.
What work of Twain’s is it from? Or which webpage or book did you glean it from?
The ninth one down.
You know who debunked this?
[Quote Investigator]
(Twenty Years From Now You Will Be More Disappointed By The Things You Didn’t Do Than By The Ones You Did Do – Quote Investigator®).
Although that second “Twain” quote is more like him in style, it is certainly unlike him in tone.
On the other hand, maybe people are just taking this (actual) Twain quote to heart:
“Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.”
– Rudyard Kipling, An Interview with Mark Twain, p. 180, From sea to sea: letters of travel, 1899, Doubleday & McClure Company.
Already cited by me in post #11, in response to the same post you replied to.
An actual quote that seems relevant:
“I didn’t really say everything I said.” - Yogi Berra