James Thurber Quotes

She came naturally by her confused and groundless fears, for her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house.

Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.

The sharp edges of old reticences are softened in the autobiographer by the passing of time - a man does not pull the pillow over his head when he wakes in the morning because he suddenly remembers some awful thing that happened to him fifteen or twenty years ago, but the confusions and the panics of last year and the year before are too close for contentment. Until a man can quit talking loudly to himself in order to shout down the memories of blunderings and gropings, he is in no shape for the painstaking examination of distress and the careful ordering of event so necessary to a calm and balanced exposition of what, exactly, was the matter.

Man has always assumed that his is the highest form of life in the universe. There is, of course, nothing at all with which to sustain this view.

Love is blind, but desire just doesn't give a good goddam. [sic]

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

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.

When I was a young writer, I liked to imagine that I was paying someone for every word I wrote, rather than being paid for it; it was a fine way to discipline myself to use only those words I needed.

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.

She wasn't much to look at but she was something to think about.

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

The jewels of sorrow last forever

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 (such as the butler, or the man under the bed — but never the husband).

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

I don't remember any blue poodles.