Top 100 Thurber Quotes
#1. Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes.
E.B. White
#2. A guest at a dinner party observed the strange expression on James Thurber's face. 'Don't be concerned,' said Thurber's wife. 'He's writing.'
Sophy Burnham
#3. I was so lucky that I didn't have anyone to copy, be impressed by. I had developed my own style, I was creating before I knew there was a Thurber, a Benchley, a Price and a Steinberg. I never saw their work until I was around thirty.
Shel Silverstein
#4. Many of the writers who have inspired me most are outside the genre: Humorists like Robert Benchley and James Thurber, screenwriters like Ben Hecht and William Goldman, and journalists/columnists like H.L. Mencken, Mike Royko and Molly Ivins.
John Scalzi
#5. its better to know some question than all answers -James Thurber
R.J. Palacio
#6. 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.
James Thurber
#7. Technically, 'Kukla, Fran and Ollie' was a kids' show, but adults watched almost religiously - and we're talking adult adults, celebrated adults - including James Thurber, Orson Welles, John Steinbeck, Adlai E. Stevenson and lyricist Stephen Sondheim.
Tom Shales
#8. James Thurber was an inspiration because his drawings were so primitive. I am self-taught - I didn't go to art school - so I thought when I started doing them, 'If James Thurber can be a cartoonist, I can,' because his stuff is very raw.
Bruce Eric Kaplan
#9. 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
#10. 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.
James Thurber
#11. Don't count your boobies until they are hatched.
James Thurber
#12. Last night I dreamed of a small consolation enjoyed only by the blind: Nobody knows the trouble I've not seen.
James Thurber
#13. 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.
James Thurber
#15. 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.
James Thurber
#16. 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
#17. 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.
James Thurber
#18. 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.
James Thurber
#19. Where most of us end up there is no knowing, but the hellbent get where they are going.
James Thurber
#20. You'll never live to wed his niece. You'll only die to feed his geese.
James Thurber
#21. Hens embarrass me; owls disturb me; if I am with an eagle I always pretend that I am not with an eagle; and so on down to swallows at twilight who scare the hell out of me. But pigeons have absolutely no effect on me.
James Thurber
#22. 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
#23. 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.
James Thurber
#24. 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
#25. Well, I'm disenchanted, too. We're all disenchanted.
James Thurber
#28. This is the posture of fortunes slave: one foot in the gravy, one foot in the grave.
James Thurber
#29. The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.
James Thurber
#30. 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
#31. It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
James Thurber
#32. I hate women because they always remember where things are.
James Thurber
#33. In the pathways between office and home and home and the houses of settled people there are always, ready to snap at you, the little perils of routine living, but there is no escape in the unplanned tangent, the sudden turn.
James Thurber
#34. 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
#35. Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy, wealthy, and dead.
James Thurber
#36. You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.
James Thurber
#38. Love is what you've been through with somebody
James Thurber
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.
James Thurber
#42. Men are more interesting than women, but women ae more fascinating.
James Thurber
#43. I'll never know the right answer for sex and marriage, sense and mirage.
James Thurber
#44. I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand.
James Thurber
#46. 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
#47. You have made the moon," The Jester said. "That is the moon.
James Thurber
#48. A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption.
A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn't make sense.
James Thurber
#49. Books can be burned," croaked Black.
"They have a way of rising from the ashes," said Andreus.
James Thurber
#50. My mother, for instance, thought-or rather, knew-that it was dangerous to drive an automobile without gasoline: it fried the valves, or something. 'Now don't you dare drive all over town without gasoline!' she would say to us when we started off (31).
James Thurber
#51. The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.
James Thurber
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. Two is company, four is a party, three is a crowd. One is a wanderer.
James Thurber
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. I would be the last person to say that madness is not a solution.
James Thurber
#58. The sanity of the average banquet speaker lasts about two and a half months; at the end of that time he begins to mutter to himself, and calls out in his sleep.
James Thurber
#59. The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal.
James Thurber
#60. A burden in the bush is worth two on your hands.
James Thurber
#61. 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
#62. 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.
James Thurber
#63. 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
#64. When man gives up on reforming and inspiring society he also gives up his freedom.
James Thurber
#65. (Cartoon caption I never really rallied after the birth of my first child.
James Thurber
#66. A new day always forgives you, unless it's raining and you wake up in jail.
Bob Thurber
#67. Time is for dragonflies and angels. The former live too little and the latter live too long.
James Thurber
#68. What would you do without me? Say 'nothing.'"
"Nothing," said the Prince.
"Good. Then you're helpless and I'll help you.
James Thurber
#70. 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.
James Thurber
#71. 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
#72. There was a mist of moss to ride through and a storm of glass.
James Thurber
#73. It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all the answers.
James Thurber
#74. This time the destruction was so complete ...
That nothing at all was left in the world
Except one man
And one woman
And one flower
James Thurber
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. You might as well fall on your face as lean over too far backwards
James Thurber
#78. You can fool too many people, too much of the time.
James Thurber
#80. A false or misunderstood word may create as much disaster as a sudden thoughtless act.
James Thurber
#81. A husband should not insult his wife publicly, at parties. He should insult her in the privacy of the home.
James Thurber
#82. I hate women because they have brought into the currency of our language such expressions as "all righty" and "yes indeedy" and hundreds of others.
James Thurber
#83. No male can beat a female in the long run because they have it over us in sheer, damn longevity.
James Thurber
#84. She wasn't much to look at but she was something to think about.
James Thurber
#85. 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
#86. Love is the strange bewilderment that overtakes one person on account of another person.
James Thurber
#88. Meanwhile, I work the route. I don't quit, I don't complain. Each day I learn more than I earn. Things are going to get better.
Bob Thurber
#89. 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
#92. 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
#93. There are two kinds of light - the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.
James Thurber
#94. Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.
James Thurber
#95. I'm 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be 48. That's the trouble with us. We number everything. Take women, for example. I think they deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of 28 and 40.
James Thurber
#96. To see things thousands of miles away, things hidden behind walls and within rooms, things dangerous to come to, to draw closer, to see and be amazed.
James Thurber
#97. But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?
James Thurber
#98. One martini is all right. Two are too many, and three are not enough.
James Thurber
#99. 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
#100. The oyster is a blob of glup, but a woman is a woman.
James Thurber
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