“I was always told that I was a sickly and precarious and tiresome and uncertain child, and lived mainly on allopathic medicines during the first seven years of my life. I asked my mother about this, in her old age—she was in her 88th year—and said:
‘I suppose that during all that time you were uneasy about me?’
‘Yes, the whole time.’
‘Afraid I wouldn’t live?’
After a reflective pause-ostensibly to think out the facts:
‘No—afraid you would.’
It sounds like plagiarism, but it probably wasn’t.”
Mark Twain, Autobiography, posthumous
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