Aging & Wisdom Quote by Mark Twain

Twain is giving you a shove away from the safety rail of explanation and into the messy, persuasive business of dramatization. "Don't say" is the tell: he’s not outlawing clarity, he’s outlawing the lazy shortcut where a writer summarizes emotion instead of staging it. The line is funny because it’s blunt, almost vaudevillian in its physicality. You can see the old lady getting hauled onstage. Twain’s wit disguises a hard rule about power: readers don’t feel labels, they feel incidents.

The intent is craft advice, but the subtext is moral. To declare "the old lady screamed" is to keep control; it’s the author as bureaucrat stamping a form. To "bring her on" is to surrender a little authority to the scene itself - to time, sensory detail, and consequence. Screaming has texture: breath, pitch, the moment before it happens, the social awkwardness after. If you actually let her scream, you have to earn it. You need a reason, a trigger, a setting that makes the sound matter.

Context matters: Twain wrote in an era when genteel narration and editorial commentary often mediated experience. His own work thrives on voices that feel overheard rather than reported, and on comedy that arrives through concrete particulars, not abstract adjectives. This is also an early blueprint for what would later be codified as "show, don’t tell" - except Twain’s version is less slogan than threat. If your prose won’t put the old lady onstage, you don’t get to borrow her scream.