Quotes from James Thurber

Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.

Sophistication might be described as the ability to cope gracefully with a situation involving the presence of a formidable menace to one's poise and prestige...

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.

To see things thousands of miles away, things hidden behind walls and within rooms, things dangerous to come to, to draw closer, to see and be amazed.

You mere device, he gnarled. You platitude! Your Gollux ex machina!

Taking a single letter from the alphaber, he said, should make life simpler. I don't see why. Take the F from life and you have lie. It's adding a letter to simple that makes it simpler. Taking a letter from hoarder makes it harder.

What would you do without me? Say 'nothing.' Nothing, said the Prince. Good. Then you're helpless and I'll help you.

Well, I'm disenchanted, too. We're all disenchanted.

you might as well fall on your face as lean over too far backwards

Authors of light pieces have, nobody knows why, a genius for getting into minor difficulties: they walk into the wrong apartments, they drink furniture polish for stomach bitters, they drive their cars into the prize tulip beds of haughty neighbors, they playfully slap gangsters, mistaking them for old school friends.

It was Lisa, aged five, whose mother asked her to thank my wife for the peas we had sent them from our garden. 'I thought the peas were awful, I wish you and Mrs. Thurber were dead, and I hate trees,' said Lisa.

Let me be the first to admit that the naked truth about me is to the naked truth about Salvador Dali as an old ukulele in the attic is to a piano in a tree, and I mean a piano with breasts. Senor Dali has the jump on me from the beginning. He remembers and describes in detail what it was like in the womb. My own earliest memory is of accompanying my father to a polling booth in Columbus, Ohio, where he voted for William McKinley.

Let us not look back to the past with anger, nor towards the future with fear, but look around with awareness.

It's forty kilometers through hell, sir," said the sergeant. Mitty finished one last brandy. "After all," he said softly, "what isn't?

Time lies frozen there. It's always Then. It's never Now.

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.

My mother, for instance, thought-or rather, knew-that it was dangerous to drive an automobile without gasoline: it fried the valves, or something. 'Now don't you dare drive all over town without gasoline!' she would say to us when we started off (31).

It had only one fault. It was kind of lousy.

All men should strive to learn before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why

Last night I dreamed of a small consolation enjoyed only by the blind: Nobody knows the trouble I've not seen.

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

Half the places I have been to, never were. I make things up. Half the things I say are there cannot be found. When I was young I told a tale of buried gold, and men from leagues around dug in the woods. I dug myself. But why? I thought the tale of treasure might be true. You said you made it up. I know I did, but then I didn't know I had. I forget things, too.

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

There is something about a poet which leads us to believe that he died, in many cases, as long as 20 years before his birth.