[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by covingtoncat73

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
-- Mark Twain

Originally Posted by covingtoncat73

Apparently Dawkins was paraphrasing from the 1959 edition (editor Charles Neider).

http://m.ebay.com/itm/THE-AUTOBIOGRA...-/401191830439

"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."

Originally Posted by kennyc

Link to the google book page: https://books.google.com/books?id=Oa...er.%22&f=false

Now that's a version I can believe. Evidently the "billions and billions" version was started by someone who was paraphrasing. Of course, learned people in Twain's day thought of the universe as being millions of years old; not billions.

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.
~ From The Autobiography of Mark Twain by Mark Twain, ed. by Charles Neider (1959).