James Thurber Quotes

"They've got him!" squealed the Duke. "Eleven men to one!"

"You may have heard of Galahad," said Hark, "whose strength was as the strength of ten."

"That leaves one man to get him," cried the Duke.

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

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread, and the angels are all in Heaven, but few of the fools are dead.

Now I am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance — a sharp, vindictive glance.

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

Every time is a time for comedy in a world of tension that would languish without it. But I cannot confine myself to lightness in a period of human life that demands light ... We all know that, as the old adage has it, "It is later than you think." ..., but I also say occasionally: "It is lighter than you think." In this light let's not look back in anger, or forward in fear, but around in awareness.

All right, have it your way — you heard a seal bark!

At forty my faculties may have closed up like flowers at evening, leaving me unable to write my memoirs with a fitting and discreet inaccuracy, or, having written them, unable to carry them to the publisher.

One martini is all right. Two are too many, and three are not enough.

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.

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

The dog has got more fun out of Man than Man has got out of the dog, for the clearly demonstrable reason that Man is the more laughable of the two animals.

She has a memory of trees and fields and nothing more.

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 call such persons "humorists", a loose-fitting and ugly word, is to miss the nature of their dilemma and the dilemma of their nature."