James thurber quotes

I'm sixty-five and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics, but if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be forty-eight.

Discussion in America means dissent.

A wet dog is lovingest.

I have lived in the East for nearly thirty years now, but many of my books prove that I am never very far away from Ohio in my thoughts, and that the clocks that strike in my dreams are often the clocks of Columbus.

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.

Dogs are obsessed with being happy.

One martini is all right. Two are too many, and three are not enough.

If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.

Youcanfooltoomanyofthepeopletoomuchofthetime. See Lincoln 510:35.

It was Lisa, aged five, whose mother asked her to thank my wife for the peas we had sent them from our garden. 'I thought the peas were awful, I wish you and Mrs. Thurber were dead, and I hate trees,' said Lisa.

Mutual suspicions of mental inadequacy are common during the first year of any marriage.

Man is troubled by what might be called the Dog Wish, a strange and involved compulsion to be as happy and carefree as a dog

Progress was all right. Only it went on too long.

A husband should not insult his wife publicly, at parties. He should insult her in the privacy of the home.

So much has already been written about everything that you can't find out anything about it.

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

The nation that complacently and fearfully allows its artists and writers to become suspected rather than respected is no longer regarded as a nation possessed with humor or depth.

Salvador [Dali] was brought up in Spain, a country colored by the legends of Hannibal, El Greco, and Cervantes. I was brought up in Ohio, a region steeped in the tradition of Coxey's Army, the Anti-Saloon League, and William Howard Taft.

But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?

There are two kinds of light - the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.

A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn't make sense.

A burden in the bush is worth two on your hands.

The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself.

If I have sometimes seemed to make fun of Woman, I assure you it has only been for the purpose of egging her on.

He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes.

I don't believe the writer should know too much where he's going. If he does, he runs into old man blueprint—old man propaganda.

The trouble with the lost generation is that it didn't get lost enough.

I write humor the way a surgeon operates, because it is a livelihood, because I have a great urge to do it, because many interesting challenges are set up, and because I have the hope it may do some good.

I have figured for you the distance between the horns of a dilemma, night and day, and A and Z. I have computed how far is Up, how long it takes to get Away, and what becomes of Gone. I have discovered the length of the sea serpent, the price of priceless, and the square of the hippopotamus. I know where you are when you are at Sixes and Sevens, how much Is you have to have to make an Are, and how many birds you can catch with the salt in the ocean - 187,796,132, if it would interest you.

(Cartoon caption:) I never really rallied after the birth of my first child.

Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?

Comedy has ceased to be a challenge to the mental processes. It has become a therapy of relaxation, a kind of tranquilizing drug.

Somebody has said that woman's place is in the wrong. That's fine. What the wrong needs is a woman's presence and a woman's touch. She is far better equipped than men to set it right.

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.

But those rare souls whose spirit gets magically into the hearts of men, leave behind them something more real and warmly personal than bodily presence, an ineffable and eternal thing. It is everlasting life touching us as something more than a vague, recondite concept. The sound of a great name dies like an echo; the splendor of fame fades into nothing; but the grace of a fine spirit pervades the places through which it has passed, like the haunting loveliness of mignonette.

Quick, name some towns in New Jersey

The things we laugh at are awful while they are going on, but get funny when we look back. And other people laugh because they've been through it too. The closest thing to humor is tragedy.

Speed is scarcely the noblest virtue of graphic composition, but it has its curious rewards. There is a sense of getting somewhere fast, which satisfies a native American urge.

Let the meek inherit the earth -- they have it coming to them.

He who hesitates is sometimes saved.

I do not have a psychiatrist and I do not want one, for the simple reason that if he listened to me long enough, he might become disturbed.

There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.

Humor and pathos, tears and laughter are, in the highest expression of human character and achievement, inseparable.

Time is for dragonflies and angels. The former live too little and the latter live too long.

There is something about a poet which leads us to believe that he died, in many cases, as long as 20 years before his birth.

Beautiful things don't ask for attention.

I never quite know when I'm not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, "Dammit, Thurber, stop writing." She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph.

The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.

Sophistication might be described as the ability to cope gracefully with a situation involving the presence of a formidable menace to one's poise and prestige (such as the butler, or the man under the bed - but never the husband).

In an extensive reading of recent books by psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, and inspirationalists, I have discovered that they all suffer from one or more of these expression-complexes: italicizing, capitalizing, exclamation-pointing, multiple-interrogating, and itemizing. These are all forms of what the psychos themselves would call, if they faced their condition frankly, Rhetorical-Over-Compensation.

The dog has got more fun out of Man than Man has got out of the dog, for the clearly demonstrable reason that Man is the more laughable of the two animals

There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception.

I loathe the expression “What makes him tick.” It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solutions, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm.

Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counselling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, 'How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style?' and avoid 'How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?'

I was seized by the stern hand of Compulsion, that dark, unreasonable Urge that impels women to clean house in the middle of the night.

The unicorn is a mythical beast.

I myself have known some profoundly thoughtful dogs.

The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people - that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature.

A false or misunderstood word may create as much disaster as a sudden thoughtless act.

Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.

If a playwright tried to see eye to eye with everybody, he would get the worst case of strabismus since Hannibal lost an eye trying to count his nineteen elephants during a snowstorm while crossing the Alps.

Writers of comedy have outlook, whereas writers of tragedy have, according to them, insight.

Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.

Two is company, four is a party, three is a crowd. One is a wanderer.

It did not take Man long-probably not more than a hundred centuries-to discover that all the animals except the dog were impossible around the house. One has but to spend a few days with an aardvark or llama, command a water buffalo to sit up and beg or try to housebreak a moose, to perceive how wisely Man set about his process of elimination and selection.

Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.

All men should strive to learn before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why.

I make mistakes, but I am on the side of Good," the Golux said, "by accident and happenchance. I had high hopes of being Evil when I was two, but in my youth I came upon a firefly burning in a spider's web. I saved the victim's life." "The firefly's ?" said the minstrel. "The spider's. The blinking arsonist had set the web on fire.

My opposition to Interviews lies in the fact that offhand answers have little value or grace of expression, and that such oral give and take helps to perpetuate the decline of the English language.

I never had a dog that showed a human fear of death. Death, to a dog, is the final unavoidable compulsion, the least ineluctable scent on a fearsome trail, but they like to face it alone, going out into the woods, among the leaves, if there are any leaves when their time comes, enduring without sentimental human distraction the Last Loneliness, which they are wise enough to know cannot be shared by anyone.

Every man is occasionally visited by the suspicion that the planet on which he is riding is not really going anywhere; that the Force which controls its measured eccentricities hasn't got anything special in mind. If he broods on this somber theme long enough he gets the doleful idea that the laughing children on a merry-go-round or the thin, fine hands of a lady's watch are revolving more purposely than he is.

Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.

Every time is a time for comedy in a world of tension that would languish without it. But I cannot confine myself to lightness in a period of human life that demands light. We all know that, as the old adage has it, "It is later than you think." But I also say occasionally: "It is lighter than you think." In this light let's not look back in anger, or forward in fear, but around in awareness.

The animals that depend on instinct have an inherent knowledge of the laws of economics and of how to apply them; Man, with his powers of reason, has reduced economics to the level of a farce which is at once funnier and more tragic than Tobacco Road.

If you wonder which is the stronger sex, watch which one twists the other around her little finger.

Humourists lead... an existence of jumpiness and apprehension. They sit on the edge of the chair of Literature. In the house of Life they have the feeling that they have never taken off their overcoats.

Women deserve to have more than 12 years between 28 and 40.

Humor does not include sarcasm, invalid irony, sardonicism, innuendo, or any other form of cruelty. When these things are raised to a high point they can become wit, but unlike the French and the English, we have not been much good at wit since the days of Benjamin Franklin.

The act of writing is either something the writer dreads or actually likes, and I actually like it. Even re-writing's fun. You're getting somewhere, whether it seems to move or not.

Man has gone long enough, or even too long, without being man enough to face the simple truth that the trouble with man is man.

A lady of 47 who has been married 27 years and has six children knows what love really is and once described it for me like this: 'Love is what you've been through with somebody'.

Humor is a serious thing. I like to think of it as one of our greatest earliest natural resources, which must be preserved at all cost.

American girls often marry someone they can't stand to spite someone they can.

Sanity, soundness, and sincerity, of which gleams and strains can still be found in the human brain under powerful microscopes, flourish only in a culture of clarification, which is now becoming harder and harder to detect with the naked eye.

Looks can be deceiving; it's eating that's believing.

Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street.

Comedy has to be done en clair. You can't blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediately clear.

Love is what you've been through with somebody.

A pinch of probability is worth a pound of perhaps.

It had only one fault. It was kind of lousy.

Unless artists can remember what it was to be a little boy, they are only half complete as artist and as man.

We all have faults, and mine is being wicked.

I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere.

Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.

Art – the one achievement of man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised

These are the days of bootleg love.

Where most of us end up there is no knowing, but the hellbent get where they are going.

With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.

The difference between our decadence and the Russians is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.

The dog has seldom been successful in pulling man up to its level of sagacity, but man has frequently dragged the dog down to his.

Columbus is a town in which almost anything is likely to happen, and in which almost everything has.

My grandmother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house. It leaked, she contended, out of empty sockets if the wall switch had been left on. She would go around screwing in bulbs, and if they lighted up, she would fearfully turn off the wall switch and go back to her Pearson's or Everybody's, happy in the satisfaction that she had stopped not only a costly but dangerous leakage. nothing could ever clear this up for her.

I am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance - a sharp, vindictive glance.

Don't count your boobies until they are hatched.

Americans want to go to heaven without dying.

History is replete with proofs, from Cato the Elder to Kennedy the Younger, that if you scratch a statesman you find an actor, but it is becoming harder and harder, in our time, to tell government from show business.

A peril of the night road is that flecks of dust and streaks of bug blood on the windshield look to me like old admirals in uniform, or crippled apple women, or the front edge of barges, and I whirl out of their way, thus going into ditches and fields and up on front lawns, endangering the life of authentic admirals and apple women who may be out on the roads for a breath of air before retiring.

Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?

Remember laughter. You'll need it even in the blessed isles of Ever After.

The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms -hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal.

Laughter need not be cut out of anything, since it improves everything.

Boys are beyond the range of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years.

Let me be the first to admit that the naked truth about me is to the naked truth about Salvador Dali as an old ukulele in the attic is to a piano in a tree, and I mean a piano with breasts. Senor Dali has the jump on me from the beginning. He remembers and describes in detail what it was like in the womb. My own earliest memory is of accompanying my father to a polling booth in Columbus, Ohio, where he voted for William McKinley.

The most dangerous food is wedding cake.

You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.

We are a nation that has always gone in for the loud laugh, the wow, the yak, the belly laugh, and the dozen other labels for the roll- em-in-the-aisles gagerissimo. This is the kind of laugh that delights actors, directors, and producers, but dismays writers of comedy because it is the laugh that often dies in the lobby. The appreciative smile, the chuckle, the soundless mirth, so important to the success of comedy, cannot be understood unless one sits among the audience and feels the warmth created by the quality of laughter that the audience takes home with it.

She wasn't much to look at but she was something to think about.

You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.

Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself in a great rear end collision.

All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.

Don't get it right, just get it written.

For one thing, she pronounced flowers 'flars' and I couldn't let it slide.

I can feel a thing I cannot touch and touch a thing I cannot feel. The first is sad and sorry, the second is your heart.

A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption.

Reason is 6/7 of treason.