James Thurber Quotes

The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms — hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal.

Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.

Comedy has to be done en clair. You can’t blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediately clear.

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

"I won't be listed and labeled or tabbed and tagged," said Clode. "If I want a book, I'll get a book."

I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere.

Books can be burned,” croaked Black.

“They have a way of rising from the ashes,” said Andreus.

But those rare souls whose spirit gets magically into the hearts of men, leave behind them something more real and warmly personal than bodily presence, an ineffable and eternal thing. It is everlasting life touching us as something more than a vague, recondite concept. The sound of a great name dies like an echo; the splendor of fame fades into nothing; but the grace of a fine spirit pervades the places through which it has passed, like the haunting loveliness of mignonette.

I trust that this collection of pieces will prove that I ave not become, at sixty six going on fifty, as one friend of mine gallantly put it, completely lugubrious.

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.

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’m 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were fifteen months in every year, I’d only be 48. That’s the trouble with us. We number everything. Take women, for example. I think they deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of 28 and 40.

A pinch of probability is worth a pound of perhaps.

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.

He picked out this sentence in a New Yorker casual of mine: "After dinner, the men moved into the living room," and he wanted to know why I, or the editors, had put in the comma. I could explain that one all right. I wrote back that this particular comma was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.