James Thurber Quotes

"Something very much like nothing anyone had ever seen before came trotting down the stairs and crossed the room.

"What is that?" the Duke asked, palely.

"I don't know what it is," said Hark, "but it's the only one there ever was.

Ne regardez pas en arrière avec colère,
ni devant avec crainte,
mais autour de vous avec conscience.

The jewels of sorrow last forever

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

"We all have flaws," he said, "and mine is being wicked."

Hens embarrass me; owls disturb me; if I am with an eagle I always pretend that I am not with an eagle...

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

Once upon a time, in a gloomy castle on a lonely hill, where there were thirteen clocks that wouldn't go, there lived a cold, aggressive Duke, and his niece, the Princess Saralinda. She was warm in every wind and weather, but he was always cold. His hands were as cold as his smile and almost as cold as his heart. He wore gloves when he was asleep, and he wore gloves when he was awake, which made if difficult for him to pick up pins or coins or the kernels of nuts, or to tear the wings from nightingales. He was six feet four, and forty-six, and even colder than he thought he was.

The Duke is lamer than I am old, and I am shorter than he is cold, but it comes to you with some surprise that I am wiser than he is wise.

Against the may, the could be, and the should, folly 'tis to balance doubt or hope.

The oyster is a blob of glup, but a woman is a woman.

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.

Después de todo ¿dónde no hay infierno?

Man has always assumed that his is the highest form of life in the universe. There is, of course, nothing at all with which to sustain this view.

Most of us, out of a politeness made up of faint curiosity and profound resignation, go out to meet the smiling stranger with a gesture of surrender and a fixed grin, but White has always taken to the fire escape. He has avoided the Man in the Reception Room as he has avoided the interviewer, the photographer, the microphone, the rostrum, the literary tea, and the Stork Club. His life is his own. He is the only writer of prominence I know of who could walk through the Algonquin lobby or between the tables at Jack and Charlie's and be recognized only by his friends.

-on his friend E.B. White