James Thurber Quotes

My drawings have been described as pre-intentionalist, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point.

Boys are beyond the range of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years.

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

...the Princess Saralinda thought she saw, as people often think they see, on clear and windless days, the distant shining shores of Ever After. Your guess is quite as good as mine (there are a lot of things that shine) but I have always thought she did, and I will always think so.

Humor and pathos, tears and laughter are, in the highest expression of human character and achievement, inseparable.

To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other and to feel. That is the purpose of life.

From now on, I think it is safe to predict, neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party will ever nominate for President a candidate without good looks, stage presence, theatrical delivery, and a sense of timing.

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.

The jewels of sorrow last forever

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

Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.

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 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.

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.

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.