James Thurber Quotes

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

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

Lately, I have been wondering if there is time left for daydreaming in this 21st-century world of constant communication.

Love is what you've been through with somebody

I admire the person who can write it right off. Mencken once said that a person who thinks clearly can write well. But I don't think clearly — too many thoughts bump into one another. Trains of thought run on a track of the Central Nervous System — the New York Central Nervous System, to make it worse.

There is something about a poet which leads us to believe that he died, in many cases, as long as 20 years before his birth.

Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?

The Princess Saralinda was tall, with freesias in her dark hair, and she wore serenity brightly like the rainbow. It was not easy to tell her mouth from the rose, or her brow from the white lilac. Her voice was faraway music, and her eyes were candles burning on a tranquil night. She moved across the room like wind in violets, and her laughter sparkled on the air, which, from her presence, gained a faint and undreamed fragrance. The Prince was frozen by her beauty, but not cold, and the Duke, who was cold but not frozen, held up the palms of his gloves, as if she were a fire at which to warm his hands.

Don't count your boobies until they are hatched.

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).

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.

If you should walk and wind and wander far enough on one of those afternoons in April when smoke goes down instead of up, and nearby things sound far away and far things near, you are more than likely to come at last to the enchanted forest that lies between the Moonstone Mines and Centaurs Mountain. You'll know the woods when you are still a long way off by virtue of a fragrance you can never quite forget and never quite remember.

In his grief over the loss of a dog, a little boy stands for the first time on tiptoe, peering into the rueful morrow of manhood. After this most inconsolable of sorrows there is nothing life can do to him that he will not be able somehow to bear.

I'll never know the right answer for sex and marriage, sense and mirage.

There are two kinds of light — the glow that illumines, and the glare that obscures.