
Violating the Boundaries: An Interview with Richard Rodriguez (1999)
Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013), p. 304
Violating the Boundaries: An Interview with Richard Rodriguez (1999)
Audience laughs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8B09JYv4Hs&feature=channel_video_title
Dialogue
Lilith, in Pt. V
1920s, Back to Methuselah (1921)
Context: I had patience with them for many ages: they tried me very sorely. They did terrible things: they embraced death, and said that eternal life was a fable. I stood amazed at the malice and destructiveness of the things I had made...
William Hazlitt Lectures on the English Poets (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1818) p. 243.
Criticism
“I cannot tell a lie, I did it with my little hatchet.”
The earliest source of this quote was a famous anecdote in The Life of George Washington, with Curious Anecdotes Laudable to Himself and Exemplary to his Countrymen (1806) by Parson Weems, which is not considered a credible source, and many incidents recounted in the work are now considered to have sprung entirely from Weems’ imagination. This derives from an anecdote of Washington, as a young boy, confessing to his father Augustine Washington that it was he who had cut a cherished cherry tree.
Variant:Father, I cannot tell a lie, I cut the tree.
Misattributed, Spurious attributions
“I cannot tell a lie, I did it with my little hatchet.”
Portrayed as the words of the young George Washington, confessing to have damaged a cherry tree in Life of Washington (1800)