Quotes from James Thurber

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

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.

There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.

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.

These are the days of bootleg love.

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 am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance - a sharp, vindictive glance.

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

For one thing, she pronounced flowers 'flars' and I couldn't let it slide.

Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street.

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

We all have faults, mine is being wicked.

He who hesitates is sometimes saved.

I make mistakes, but I am on the side of Good, the Golux said, by accident and happenchance. I had high hopes of being Evil when I was two, but in my youth I came upon a firefly burning in a spider's web. I saved the victim's life. The firefly's ? said the minstrel. The spider's. The blinking arsonist had set the web on fire.

I hate women because they always remember where things are.

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

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

The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself.

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

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

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

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.

Quick, name some towns in New Jersey

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.