James Thurber Quotes

All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.

~ James Thurber

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

~ James Thurber

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.

~ James Thurber

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

~ James Thurber

Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.

~ James Thurber

I'll never know the right answer for sex and marriage, sense and mirage.

~ James Thurber

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.

~ James Thurber

Live life by the abc's...adventure, bravery and creativity.

~ James Thurber

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

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

She has a memory of trees and fields and nothing more.

~ James Thurber

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

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

I admire the person who can write it right off. Mencken once said that a person who thinks clearly can write well. But I don't think clearly--too many thoughts bump into one another. Trains of thought run on a track of the Central Nervous System--the New York Central Nervous System, to make it worse.

~ James Thurber

...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

I am 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were 15 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 12 years between the ages of 28 and 40.

~ James Thurber

I'm sixty-five but if there were fifteen months in every year I'd only be forty-eight.

~ James Thurber

It's a naive domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.

~ James Thurber

Humour is emotional chaos remembered in tranquillity.

~ James Thurber

Though statisticians in our time have never kept the score man wants a great deal here below and Woman even more.

~ James Thurber

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

~ James Thurber

We all have flaws and mine is being wicked.

~ James Thurber

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

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.

~ James Thurber

Love is what you've been through with somebody.

~ James Thurber

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

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.

~ James Thurber

The most dangerous food is wedding cake.

~ James Thurber

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

~ James Thurber

I hate women because they always know where things are.

~ James Thurber

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

~ James Thurber

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.

~ James Thurber

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

~ James Thurber

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

~ James Thurber

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

~ James Thurber

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

~ James Thurber

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

~ James Thurber

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

~ James Thurber

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

~ James Thurber