James Thurber Quotes

121 Sourced Quotes

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

James Thurber
Men of all degrees should form this prudent habit: never serve a rabbit stew before you catch the rabbit.

James Thurber
I am not a dog lover. A dog lover to me means a dog that is in love with another dog.

James Thurber
In anything funny you write that isn't close to serious you've missed something along the line.

James Thurber
With humor you have to look out for traps. You're likely to be very gleeful with what you've first put down, and you think it's fine, very funny. One reason you go over and over it is to make the piece sound less as if you were having a lot of fun with it yourself. You try to play it down.

James Thurber
The paths of glory at least lead to the Grave, but the paths of duty may not get you Anywhere.

James Thurber
He had as much fun in the water as any person I have known. You didn't have to throw a stick in the water to get him to go in. Of course, he would bring back a stick to you if you did throw one in. He would even have brought back a piano if you had thrown one in.

James Thurber
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.

James Thurber
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.

James Thurber
Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

James Thurber
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
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
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.

James Thurber
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
I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand.

James Thurber
All things, as we know, are impossible in this most impossible of all impossible worlds.

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

James Thurber
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
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.

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

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

James Thurber
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
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
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
If you don't pay no mind to diseases, they will go away.

James Thurber
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
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
Science has zipped the atom open in a dozen places, it can read the scrawling on the Rosetta stone as glibly as a literary critic explains Hart Crane, but it doesn't know anything about playwrights.

James Thurber
"The moon is 300,000 miles away," said the Royal Mathematician. "It is round and flat like a coin, only it is made of asbestos, and it is half the size of this kingdom. Furthermore, it is pasted on the sky."

James Thurber
We have no scientific data whatever on clock-eating and hence no controlled observation.

James Thurber