James Thurber Quotes - Page 7

Quotes about:

• The paths of glory at least lead to the Grave, but the paths of duty may not get you Anywhere.

  James Thurber

  May, Path, Glory

  James Thurber (1996). “James Thurber: Writings & Drawings (including The Secret Life of Walter Mitty)”, p.585, Library of America

  6 Copy quote

• Until a man can quit talking loudly to himself in order to shout down the memories of blunderings and gropings, he is in no shape for the painstaking examination of distress.

  James Thurber

  Memories, Men, Order

  James Thurber (1996). “James Thurber: Writings & Drawings (including The Secret Life of Walter Mitty)”, p.232, Library of America

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• You are all a lost generation," Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. We weren't lost. We knew where we were, all right, but we wouldn't go home. Ours was the generation that stayed up all night.

  James Thurber

  Home, Night, Gertrude

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• 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.

  James Thurber

  Flower, Writing, Leaving

  James Thurber (1996). “James Thurber: Writings & Drawings (including The Secret Life of Walter Mitty)”, p.149, Library of America

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• The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.

  James Thurber

  Cylinders

  James Thurber (1996). “James Thurber: Writings & Drawings (including The Secret Life of Walter Mitty)”, p.648, Library of America

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• Most of the faint intimations of immortality of which we are occasionally aware would seem to arise out of Art or the materials of Art.

  James Thurber

  Art, Immortality, Arise

  James Thurber (1996). “Writings and Drawings”, Library of America

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• Though statisticians in our time have never kept the score, Man wants a great deal here below and Woman even more.

  James Thurber

  Men, Greed, Want

  James Thurber (1956). “Further fables for our time”

  5 Copy quote

• Muggs was always sorry, Mother said, when he bit someone, but we could never understand how she figured this out. He didn't act sorry.

  James Thurber

  Mother, Dog, Sorry

  7 Copy quote

• If you are a police dog, where's your badge?

  James Thurber

  Dog, Police, Badges

  James Thurber (1996). “James Thurber: Writings & Drawings (including The Secret Life of Walter Mitty)”, p.59, Library of America

  6 Copy quote

• This is the posture of fortunes slave: one foot in the gravy, one foot in the grave.

  James Thurber

  Ambition, Feet, Slave

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

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• One has but to observe a community of beavers at work in a stream to understand the loss in his sagacity, balance, co-operation, competence, and purpose which Man has suffered since he rose up on his hind legs. He began to chatter and he developed Reason, Thought, and Imagination, qualities which would get the smartest group of rabbits or orioles in the world into inextricable trouble overnight.

  James Thurber

  Loss, Men, Imagination

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

  8 Copy quote

• He had as much fun in the water as any person I have known. You didn't have to throw a stick in the water to get him to go in. Of course, he would bring back a stick to you if you did throw one in. He would even have brought back a piano if you had thrown one in.

  James Thurber

  Dog, Fun, Piano

  James Thurber (1996). “James Thurber: Writings & Drawings (including The Secret Life of Walter Mitty)”, p.333, Library of America

  7 Copy quote

• No male can beat a female in the long run because they have it over us in sheer, damn longevity.

  James Thurber

  Running, Women, Long

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• Hundreds of hysterical persons must confuse these phenomena with messages from the beyond and take their glory to the bishop rather than the eye doctor.

  James Thurber

  Atheist, Eye, Doctors

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• I don't remember any blue poodles.

  James Thurber

  Blue, Poodles, Remember

  James Thurber, Marc Simont (1998). “Many Moons”, p.12, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I'm 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be 48. That's the trouble with us. We number everything. Take women, for example. I think they deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of 28 and 40.

  James Thurber

  Thinking, Years, Numbers

  Quoted in an interview with Glenna Syse in Time Magazine, August 15, 1960.

  9 Copy quote

• Authors of light pieces have, nobody knows why, a genius for getting into minor difficulties: they walk into the wrong apartments, they drink furniture polish for stomach bitters, they drive their cars into the prize tulip beds of haughty neighbors, they playfully slap gangsters, mistaking them for old school friends.

  James Thurber

  Old School, Light, Car

  James Thurber (1996). “James Thurber: Writings & Drawings (including The Secret Life of Walter Mitty)”, p.150, Library of America

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• The appreciative smile, the chuckle, the soundless mirth, so important to the success of comedy, cannot be understood unless one sits among the audience and feels the warmth created by the quality of laughter that the audience takes home with it.

  James Thurber

  Happiness, Success, Laughter

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

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• Last night I dreamed of a small consolation enjoyed only by the blind: Nobody knows the trouble I've not seen!

  James Thurber

  Night, Lasts, Blind

  8 Copy quote

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