A review by fa_biene
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

4.0

The part I love most is a powerful passage on morality, and one's individual judgement as opposed to society's rules and teachings.

Context of the quote: Huck reflects on the morality of helping Jim escape.
He thinks about the lessons he learned in Sunday school, teaching him what happens to people who assist runaway slaves. “People that acts as I’d been acting about [Jim],” he’d been told, “goes to everlasting fire.” 

Huck worries about that, and decides to do "the right thing" and write a letter to Jim's owner and tell her where Jim can be found. However, his subjective judgement gets in the way:

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking- thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time; in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him agin in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he's got now; and then I happened to look around, and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:"All right, then, I'll go to hell"- and tore it up.

Ah - brilliant!