James Thurber Quotes

There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception.

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”.

It is hard for me to believe that Miss Groby ever saw any work of literature from far enough away to know what it meant. She was forever climbing up the margins of books and crawling between their lines for the little gold of phrase, making marks with a pencil. As Palamides hunted the Questing Beast, she hunted the Figure of Speech. She hunted it through the clangorous halls of Shakespeare and through the green forests of Scott.

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.

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

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.

A burden in the bush is worth two on your hands.

He would say to a suitor, “What is the difference in the length of my legs?” and if the youth replied, “Why, one is shorter than the other,” the Duke would run him through with the sword he carried in his swordcane and feed him to the geese. The suitor was supposed to say, “Why, one is longer than the other.

He who hesitates is sometimes saved.

The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people — that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature.

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.

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

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.

The difference between our decadence and the Russians is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.

Quick, name some towns in New Jersey