James Thurber Quotes

When I was a young writer, I liked to imagine that I was paying someone for every word I wrote, rather than being paid for it; it was a fine way to discipline myself to use only those words I needed.

Man is troubled by what might be called the Dog Wish, a strange and involved compulsion to be as happy and carefree as a dog.

...I would be the last person to say that madness is not a solution.

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.

A dehoy who was terribly hobble,
Cast only stones that were cobble
And bats that were ding,
From a shot that was sling,
But never hit inks that were bobble.

The old man moaned and maundered, murmured, muttered, mumbled odds of this and ends of that, bits and pieces, shreds and edges, full of ifs and whens and theres and thens, amounting in the end and all to six times less than nothing.

"It was written all in O, or nearly so, and all the O's are gone," said Andrea. "When coat is cat, and boat is bat, and goatherd looks like gathered, and booth is both, since both are bth, the reader's eye is bothered."

"And power is power, and zero zer, and, worst of all, a hero's her." The old man sighed as he said it.

"Anoon is ann, and moan is man." Andrea smiled as she said it.

"And shoe," Andreus said, "is she."

"Ah, woe," the old man said, "is we."

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.

I don’t understand,” said the scientist, “why you lemmings all rush down to the sea and drown yourselves.” “How curious,” said the lemming. “The one thing I don’t understand is why you human beings don’t.

Laugh and the world laughs with you, love and you love alone.

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

"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."

He would say to a suitor, “What is the difference in the length of my legs?” and if the youth replied, “Why, one is shorter than the other,” the Duke would run him through with the sword he carried in his swordcane and feed him to the geese. The suitor was supposed to say, “Why, one is longer than the other.

This time the destruction was so complete...
That nothing at all was left in the world
Except one man
And one woman
And one flower

It’s an agent of the devil, sent to punish evildoers for having done less evil than they should.