Quotes from James Thurber

I am trying to use reason and intelligence, said the strange new mongoose. Reason is six-sevenths of treason, said one of his neighbors. Intelligence is what the enemy uses, said another.

Against the may, the could be, and the should, folly 'tis to balance doubt or hope.

Hens embarrass me; owls disturb me; if I am with an eagle I always pretend that I am not with an eagle...

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.

It was written all in O, or nearly so, and all the O's are gone, said Andrea. When coat is cat, and boat is bat, and goatherd looks like gathered, and booth is both, since both are bth, the reader's eye is bothered. And power is power, and zero zer, and, worst of all, a hero's her. The old man sighed as he said it. Anoon is ann, and moan is man. Andrea smiled as she said it. And shoe, Andreus said, is she. Ah, woe, the old man said, is we.

ta-pocketa, ta-pocketa

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

Never trust a spy you cannot see. 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.

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

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.

Half a mile from Haverstraw there lived a halfwit fellow, Half his house was brick and red, and half was wood and yellow; Half the town knew half his name but only half could spell it. If you will sit for half an hour, I've half a mind to tell it.

A soft finger touched his shoulder and he turned to see a little man smiling in the moonlight. He wore an indescribable hat, his eyes were wide and astonished, as if everything were happening for the first time, and he had a dark describable beard.

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.

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.

The average sendentary man of our time who is at all suggestible must emerge from this chapter believing that his chances of surviving a combination of instinct, complexes, reflexes, glands, sex, and present-day traffic conditions are about equal to those of a one-legged man trying to get out of a labyrinth.

It is more dangerous to strong-arm life than to embrace it.

Now, taking books, or anything else, from a little girl is like taking arms from an Arab, or candy from a baby...

I won't be listed and labeled or tabbed and tagged, said Clode. If I want a book, I'll get a book.

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)

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.

ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.

It's an agent of the devil, sent to punish evildoers for having done less evil than they should.

See is deceiving. It's eating that's believing.

I trust that this collection of pieces will prove that I ave not become, at sixty six going on fifty, as one friend of mine gallantly put it, completely lugubrious.