James Thurber Quotes - Page 4

Quotes about:

• 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

  James Thurber

  Dog, Men, Wish

  James Thurber (1955). “Thurber's Dog's: A Collection of the Master's Dogs”

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• I never quite know when I'm not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, "Dammit, Thurber, stop writing." She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph.

  James Thurber

  Party, Writing, Wife

  James Thurber, Thomas Fensch (1989). “Conversations with James Thurber”, p.61, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• He who hesitates is sometimes saved.

  James Thurber

  Sometimes, Indecision, Saved

  1945 The Thurber Carnival,'The Glass in the Field'.

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• Dogs are obsessed with being happy.

  James Thurber

  Dog, Obsessed

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• Quick, name some towns in New Jersey

  James Thurber

  Names, Towns, Jersey

  James Thurber (1996). “James Thurber: Writings & Drawings (including The Secret Life of Walter Mitty)”, p.190, Library of America

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• He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes.

  James Thurber

  Art, Likes, Favourite

  Cartoon caption, New Yorker, 4 Nov. 1939 See Gelett Burgess 6

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• If a playwright tried to see eye to eye with everybody, he would get the worst case of strabismus since Hannibal lost an eye trying to count his nineteen elephants during a snowstorm while crossing the Alps.

  James Thurber

  Eye, Elephants, Theatre

  James Thurber (1990). “Collecting Himself: James Thurber on Writing and Writers, Humor and Himself”

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• Humor and pathos, tears and laughter are, in the highest expression of human character and achievement, inseparable.

  James Thurber

  Laughter, Character, Expression

  James Thurber (1961). “Lanterns & lances”

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• Where most of us end up there is no knowing, but the hellbent get where they are going.

  James Thurber

  Knowing, Ends

  James Thurber (1978). “Further fables for our time”, Simon & Schuster

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• In an extensive reading of recent books by psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, and inspirationalists, I have discovered that they all suffer from one or more of these expression-complexes: italicizing, capitalizing, exclamation-pointing, multiple-interrogating, and itemizing. These are all forms of what the psychos themselves would call, if they faced their condition frankly, Rhetorical-Over-Compensation.

  James Thurber

  Reading, Book, Expression

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• I write humor the way a surgeon operates, because it is a livelihood, because I have a great urge to do it, because many interesting challenges are set up, and because I have the hope it may do some good.

  James Thurber

  Writing, Interesting, Challenges

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

  James Thurber

  Dog, Cat, Men

  James Thurber (1961). “Lanterns & Lances”, New York : Harper

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• When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.

  James Thurber

  Writing, Justice, Glare

  James Thurber (1990). “Collecting Himself: James Thurber on Writing and Writers, Humor and Himself”

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• Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street.

  James Thurber

  Sad, Death, Desire

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• 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.

  James Thurber

  Mother, Hate, Garden

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• Salvador [Dali] was brought up in Spain, a country colored by the legends of Hannibal, El Greco, and Cervantes. I was brought up in Ohio, a region steeped in the tradition of Coxey's Army, the Anti-Saloon League, and William Howard Taft.

  James Thurber

  Country, Army, Ohio

  JAMES THURBER (1945). “THE THURBER CARNIVAL”

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• I loathe the expression “What makes him tick.” It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solutions, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm.

  James Thurber

  Fall, Simple, Expression

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• The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.

  James Thurber

  Taste, Comedy, Dignity

  1961 Lanterns and Lances,'The Duchess and the Bugs'.

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• It had only one fault. It was kind of lousy.

  James Thurber

  Kindness, Faults, Kind

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• Sanity, soundness, and sincerity, of which gleams and strains can still be found in the human brain under powerful microscopes, flourish only in a culture of clarification, which is now becoming harder and harder to detect with the naked eye.

  James Thurber

  Powerful, Eye, Brain

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• The difference between our decadence and the Russians is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.

  James Thurber

  Differences, Apathy, Comedy

  The Observer, February 05, 1961.

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• We all have faults, and mine is being wicked.

  James Thurber

  Wicked, Faults, Comedy

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• Don't count your boobies until they are hatched.

  James Thurber

  James Thurber (1996). “James Thurber: Writings & Drawings (including The Secret Life of Walter Mitty)”, p.588, Library of America

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• Humourists lead... an existence of jumpiness and apprehension. They sit on the edge of the chair of Literature. In the house of Life they have the feeling that they have never taken off their overcoats.

  James Thurber

  Taken, House, Feelings

  1933 On humorists. My Life and Hard Times, preface.

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• 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.

  James Thurber

  Believe, Years, Long

  Quoted in Helen Thurber and Edward Weeks (eds) Selected Letters of James Thurber (1981).

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