Quotes from James Thurber

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.

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.

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.

Women deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of twenty-eight and forty.

Boys are beyond the range of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years.

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.

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

Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness.

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

I suppose that the high-water mark of my youth in Columbus, Ohio, was the night the bed fell on my father.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Early to rise and early to bed Makes a man healthy and wealthy and dead.

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

Boys are beyond the range of anyone's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years.

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

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

In Martinique, when the whistle blew for the tourists to get back on the ship, I had a quick, wild, and lovely moment when I decided I wouldn't get back on the ship. I did, though. And I found that somebody had stolen the pants to my dinner jacket.

Red Barber announces the Dodger games and he uses those expressions—picked them up down South…. "Tearing up the pea patch" means going on a rampage; "sitting in the catbird seat" means sitting pretty, like a batter with three balls and no strikes on him.

I loathe the expression "What makes him tick." It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution, 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.