James Thurber Quotes

People who do not understand pigeons — and pigeons can be understood only when you understand that there is nothing to understand about them — should not go around describing pigeons or the effect of pigeons.

Somebody has said that woman's place is in the wrong. That's fine. What the wrong needs is a woman's presence and a woman's touch. She is far better equipped than men to set it right.

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

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

There are two kinds of light - the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.

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

A pinch of probability is worth a pound of perhaps.

Salvador [Dali] was brought up in Spain, a country colored by the legends of Hannibal, El Greco, and Cervantes. I was brought up in Ohio, a region steeped in the tradition of Coxey's Army, the Anti-Saloon League, and William Howard Taft.

The cold Duke was afraid of Now, for Now has warmth and urgency, and Then is dead and buried.

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.

I won't go down the horrible street
To see the horrible people
I'll gladly climb the terrible stair
That leads to the terrible steeple
And the terrible rats
And the terrible bats
And the cats in the terrible steeple
But I won't go down the horrible street
To see the horrible people

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.

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

The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody’s guess.

With 60 staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs.