James Thurber

The Princess Saralinda was tall, with freesias in her dark hair, and she wore serenity brightly like the rainbow. It was not easy to tell her mouth from the rose, or her brow from the white lilac. Her voice was faraway music, and her eyes were candles burning on a tranquil night. She moved across the room like wind in violets, and her laughter sparkled on the air, which, from her presence, gained a faint and undreamed fragrance. The Prince was frozen by her beauty, but not cold, and the Duke, who was cold but not frozen, held up the palms of his gloves, as if she were a fire at which to warm his hands.

There was a mist of moss to ride through and a storm of glass.

Discussion in America means dissent.

You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.

Geep,' whuppled the parrot.

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

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

I can do a score of things that can’t be done.

I can find a thing I can’t see, and I see a thing I can’t find.

The first is time, and the second is a spot before my eyes.

I can feel a thing I cannot touch, and I touch a thing I cannot feel.

The first is sad and sorry, and the second is your heart.

What would you do without me? Say “nothing”.

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

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.

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.

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

At forty my faculties may have closed up like flowers at evening, leaving me unable to write my memoirs with a fitting and discreet inaccuracy, or, having written them, unable to carry them to the publisher.

Most of us, out of a politeness made up of faint curiosity and profound resignation, go out to meet the smiling stranger with a gesture of surrender and a fixed grin, but White has always taken to the fire escape. He has avoided the Man in the Reception Room as he has avoided the interviewer, the photographer, the microphone, the rostrum, the literary tea, and the Stork Club. His life is his own. He is the only writer of prominence I know of who could walk through the Algonquin lobby or between the tables at Jack and Charlie's and be recognized only by his friends.

-on his friend E.B. White

The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.