Top 100 James Thurber Quotes
#1. Last night I dreamed of a small consolation enjoyed only by the blind: Nobody knows the trouble I've not seen.
James Thurber
#2. Sean O'Connell: Sometimes I don't. If I like a moment, for me, personally, I don't like to have the distraction of the camera. I just want to stay in it.
James Thurber
#3. 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 ...
James Thurber
#4. 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.
James Thurber
#7. Boys are beyond the range of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years.
James Thurber
#8. It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
James Thurber
#9. I hate women because they always remember where things are.
James Thurber
#10. Something very much like nothing anyone had ever seen before came trotting down the stairs and crossed the room.
"What is that?" the Duke asked, palely.
"I don't know what it is," said Hark, "but it's the only one there ever was.
James Thurber
#11. Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy, wealthy, and dead.
James Thurber
#12. You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.
James Thurber
#13. 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.
James Thurber
#14. You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
Fables for Our Time, Moral of "The Owl Who Was God" (1940)
James Thurber
#15. When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.
James Thurber
#16. I'll never know the right answer for sex and marriage, sense and mirage.
James Thurber
#17. I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand.
James Thurber
#19. 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.
James Thurber
#20. The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.
James Thurber
#21. At least she's not guilty of integrity, and that's more than I can say of any Bell in four generations except my grandfather and myself.
James Thurber
#22. Muggs was always sorry, Mother said, when he bit someone, but we could never understand how she figured this out. He didn't act sorry.
James Thurber
#23. Two is company, four is a party, three is a crowd. One is a wanderer.
James Thurber
#24. Human Dignity has gleamed only now and then and here and there, in lonely splendor, throughout the ages, a hope of the better men, never an achievement of the majority.
James Thurber
#25. Walter Mitty: To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other, and to feel. That is the purpose of life.
James Thurber
#26. I would be the last person to say that madness is not a solution.
James Thurber
#27. A burden in the bush is worth two on your hands.
James Thurber
#28. 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.
James Thurber
#29. I used to wake up at 4 A.M. and start sneezing, sometimes for five hours. I tried to find out what sort of allergy I had but finally came to the conclusion that it must be an allergy to consciousness.
James Thurber
#30. When man gives up on reforming and inspiring society he also gives up his freedom.
James Thurber
#31. Time is for dragonflies and angels. The former live too little and the latter live too long.
James Thurber
#32. The old man moaned and maundered, murmured, muttered, mumbled odds of this and ends of that, bits and pieces, shreds and edges, full of ifs and whens and theres and thens, amounting in the end and all to six times less than nothing.
James Thurber
#33. You are all a lost generation, Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. We weren't lost. We knew where we were, all right, but we wouldn't go home. Ours was the generation that stayed up all night.
James Thurber
#34. 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.
James Thurber
#35. You can fool too many people, too much of the time.
James Thurber
#36. A husband should not insult his wife publicly, at parties. He should insult her in the privacy of the home.
James Thurber
#37. Those rare souls whose spirit gets magically into the hearts of men leave behind them something real and warmly personal ... the grace of a fine spirit pervades the places through which it has passed, like the haunting loveliness of mignonette.
James Thurber
#38. Love is the strange bewilderment that overtakes one person on account of another person.
James Thurber
#40. Her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house.
James Thurber
#42. 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.
James Thurber
#43. There are two kinds of light - the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.
James Thurber
#44. Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.
James Thurber
#45. Most of the faint intimations of immortality of which we are occasionally aware would seem to arise out of Art or the materials of Art.
James Thurber
#46. It's forty kilometers through hell, sir," said the sergeant. Mitty finished one last brandy. "After all," he said softly, "what isn't?
James Thurber
#47. Man has always assumed that his is the highest form of life in the universe. There is, of course, nothing at all with which to sustain this view.
James Thurber
#48. The trouble with the lost generation is that it didn't get lost enough.
James Thurber
#49. Humor and pathos, tears and laughter are, in the highest expression of human character and achievement, inseparable.
James Thurber
#50. It is better to have loafed and lost than never to have loafed at all.
James Thurber
#51. 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.
James Thurber
#52. To call such persons "humorists", a loose-fitting and ugly word, is to miss the nature of their dilemma and the dilemma of their nature.
James Thurber
#53. There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception.
James Thurber
#54. I love the idea of there being two sexes, don't you?
James Thurber
#55. 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.
James Thurber
#56. Laughter need not be cut out of anything, since it improves everything.
James Thurber
#57. Against the may, the could be, and the should, folly 'tis to balance doubt or hope.
James Thurber
#59. The Princess Saralinda thought she saw, as people often think they see, on clear and windless days, the distant shining shores of Ever After. Your guess is quite as good as mine (there are a lot of things that shine) but I have always thought she did, and I will always think so.
James Thurber
#60. I am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance - a sharp, vindictive glance.
James Thurber
#61. A pinch of probability is worth a pound of perhaps.
James Thurber
#62. Let us not look back to the past with anger, nor towards the future with fear, but look around with awareness.
James Thurber
#63. Women deserve to have more than 12 years between 28 and 40.
James Thurber
#64. There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.
James Thurber
#65. She has a memory of trees and fields and nothing more.
James Thurber
#66. 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.
James Thurber
#67. Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other
James Thurber
#68. 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.
James Thurber
#69. Until a man can quit talking loudly to himself in order to shout down the memories of blunderings and gropings, he is in no shape for the painstaking examination of distress.
James Thurber
#70. My drawings have been described as pre-internationalist, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point.
James Thurber
#71. The noblest study of mankind is Man, says Man.
James Thurber
#72. 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.
James Thurber
#73. I am the Golux, the only Golux in the world and not a mere device
James Thurber
#74. In his grief over the loss of a dog, a little boy stands for the first time on tiptoe, peering into the rueful morrow of manhood. After this most inconsolable of sorrows there is nothing life can do to him that he will not be able somehow to bear.
James Thurber
#75. 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.
James Thurber
#76. Taking a single letter from the alphaber," he said, "should make life simpler."
"I don't see why. Take the F from life and you have lie. It's adding a letter to simple that makes it simpler. Taking a letter from hoarder makes it harder.
James Thurber
#77. Though statisticians in our time have never kept the score, Man wants a great deal here below and Woman even more.
James Thurber
#79. Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.
James Thurber
#80. I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age.
James Thurber
#81. All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.
James Thurber
#82. He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes.
James Thurber
#83. Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.
James Thurber
#84. Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.
James Thurber
#85. I drew pictures rapidly and with few lines, because I had to write most of the pieces, too, and couldn't monkey long with the drawings. The divine urge was no higher than that.
James Thurber
#87. 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.
James Thurber
#88. So much has already been written about everything that you can't find out anything about it.
James Thurber
#89. I myself have known some profoundly thoughtful dogs.
James Thurber
#90. In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti.
James Thurber
#91. I won't be listed and labeled or tabbed and tagged," said Clode. "If I want a book, I'll get a book.
James Thurber
#93. 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.
James Thurber
#94. For one thing, she pronounced flowers 'flars' and I couldn't let it slide.
James Thurber
#95. Love is blind, but desire just doesn't give a good goddamn
James Thurber
#98. 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.
James Thurber
#99. It is all but impossible to sit quietly by when someone is throwing salad plates.
James Thurber
#100. All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.
James Thurber
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