It was not Mark Twain who said the phrase.
The quote first appeared in an editorial in the Hartford Courant of August 24, 1897, probably written by associate editor Charles Dudley Warner.
Warner had collaborated with Twain on The Gilded Age (1873).
The novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez tells the story of seven generations of the Buendia family in the village of Macondo.
The deepest circle of Hell in Dante’s Inferno is the Ninth Circle. It is where betrayers of their family or country are frozen in ice. There, in the center of the earth, a three-headed Lucifer eats at Judas Iscariot and at Cassius and Brutus, betrayers of Julius Caesar.
Aegisthus was Clytemnestra’s lover in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. He conspired with Clytemnestra to kill her husband, Agamemnon.
Thoreau lived in his hut at Walden Pond for two years from 1845 to 1847. His account of the experience, Walden, or Life in the Woods, appeared in 1854.
Chaucer’s pilgrims are going to Canterbury Cathedral to visit the shrine of Thomas a Becket, former archbishop of Canterbury. Becket had been assassinated in the cathedral in 1170, following a political disagreement with King Henry II. Pilgrimage to the shrine was a popular journey at the time the Tales were written (c. 1387-1400).
Oedipus is crushed by fate in Jean Cocteau’s tragedy The Infernal Machine.