James Thurber Quotes

The cold Duke was afraid of Now, for Now has warmth and urgency, and Then is dead and buried.

Americans want to go to heaven without dying.

He who hesitates is sometimes saved.

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.

We all have faults, and mine is being wicked.

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

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

It takes that je ne sais quoi which we call sophistication for a woman to be magnificent in a drawing-room when her faculties have departed but she herself has not yet gone home.

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

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.

I don't remember any blue poodles.

This heavish sweety fragrance,' Thag muttered to himself, 'that rises, or that roses, isn't fit for human noses, and it tricks the minds of men. Three times two is eight,' he said, 'and one is ten.

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

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti.

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

Lately, I have been wondering if there is time left for daydreaming in this 21st-century world of constant communication.

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

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.

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

I would be the last person to say that madness is not a solution.

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.

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

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

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.

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

On his misfit globe he has outlasted the mammoth and the pterodactyl, but he has never got the upper hand of bacteria and the insects.

Don't count your boobies until they are hatched.

At forty my faculties may have closed up like flowers at evening, leaving me unable to write my memoirs with a fitting and discreet inaccuracy, or, having written them, unable to carry them to the publisher.

Hundreds of hysterical persons must confuse these phenomena with messages from the beyond and take their glory to the bishop rather than the eye doctor.

We all have flaws," he said, "and mine is being wicked.

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

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.

I am the Golux, the only Golux in the world and not a mere device

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.

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

The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.

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.

It is better to have loafed and lost than never to have loafed at all.

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

Have you brought the moon to me?" she asked. "Not yet," said the Court Jester, "but I will get it for you right away. How big do you think it is?" "It is just a little smaller than my thumbnail," she said, "for when I hold my thumbnail up at the moon, it just covers it." "And how far away is it? asked the Court Jester. "It is not as high as the big tree outside my window," said the Princess, "for sometimes it gets caught in the top branches." It will be very easy to get the moon for you," said the Court Jester. "I will climb the tree tonight when it gets caught in the top branches and bring it to you." The he thought of something else. "What is the moon make of, Princess?" he asked. "Oh," she said, "it's made of gold, of course, silly.

Beautiful things don't ask for attention.

You'll never live to wed his niece. You'll only die to feed his geese.

You have made the moon," The Jester said. "That is the moon.

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.

Discussion in America means dissent.

Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy, wealthy, and dead.

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.

The whole of Paris is a vast university of Art, Literature and Music ... it is worth anyone's while to dally here for years. Paris is a seminar, a post-graduate course in everything.

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

People who do not understand pigeons―and pigeons can be understood only when you understand that there is nothing to understand about them―should not go around describing pigeons or the effect of pigeons.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

If you are a police dog, where's your badge?

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

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

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.

One has but to observe a community of beavers at work in a stream to understand the loss in his sagacity, balance, co-operation, competence, and purpose which Man has suffered since he rose up on his hind legs. He began to chatter and he developed Reason, Thought, and Imagination, qualities which would get the smartest group of rabbits or orioles in the world into inextricable trouble overnight.

One afternoon a big wolf waited in a dark forest for a little girl to come along, carrying a basket of food to her grandmother. Finally a little girl did come a long and she was carrying a basket of food. "Are you carrying that basket to your grandmother? asked the wolf. The little girl said yes, she was. So the wolf asked her where her grandmother lived and the little girl told him and he disappeared into the wood.
When the little girl opened the door of her grandmother's house she saw that there was somebody in bed with a nightcap and nightgown on. She had approached no nearer than twenty-five feet from the bed when she saw that it was not her grandmother but the wolf, for even in a nightcap a wolf does not look any more like your grandmother than the Metro-Goldwyn lion looks like Calvin Coolidge. So the little girl took an automatic out of her basket and shot the wolf dead.
Moral: It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be.

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

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.

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

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)

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.

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.

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.

Quick, name some towns in New Jersey

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

We all have faults, mine is being wicked.

Her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house.

This is the posture of fortunes slave: one foot in the gravy, one foot in the grave.

What would you do without me? Say 'nothing.'"
"Nothing," said the Prince.
"Good. Then you're helpless and I'll help you.

Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.

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.

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

I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age.

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

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 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.

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.

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 Duke is lamer than I am old, and I am shorter than he is cold, but it comes to you with some surprise that I am wiser than he is wise.

The unicorn is a mythical beast,

I love the idea of there being two sexes, don't you?

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.

Love is what you've been through with somebody

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.

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).

The oyster is a blob of glup, but a woman is a woman.

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.

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

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.

The brambles and the thorns grew thick and thicker in a ticking thicket of bickering crickets. Farther along and stronger, bonged the gongs of a throng of frogs, green and vivid on their lily pads. From the sky came the crying of flies, and the pilgrims leaped over a bleating sheep creeping knee-deep in a sleepy stream, in which swift and slippery snakes slid and slithered silkily, whispering sinful secrets.

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.

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

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.