James Thurber Quotes

There are two kinds of light - the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.

Human Dignity has gleamed only now and then and here and there, in lonely splendor, throughout the ages, a hope of the better men, never an achievement of the majority.

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. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, “Is he sick?” “No,” my wife says, “he’s writing something.”

Discussion in America means dissent.

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

Man has gone long enough, or even too long, without being man enough to face the simple truth that the trouble with Man is Man.

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

A pinch of probability is worth a pound of perhaps.

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.

The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-poc keta-pocketa.

All men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.

All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.

A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn't make any sense.

Love is blind, but desire just doesn't give a good goddam.

Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.

Don't get it right, just get it written.

He who hesitates is sometimes saved.

Don't count your boobies until they are hatched.

Once upon a sunny morning a man who sat in a breakfast nook looked up from his scrambled eggs to see a white unicorn with a golden horn quietly cropping the roses in the garden. The man went up to the bedroom where his wife was still asleep and woke her. "There's a unicorn in the garden," he said. "Eating roses."

You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.