James Thurber Quotations | Page 3

Comedy has ceased to be a challenge to the mental processes. It has become a therapy of relaxation, a kind of tranquilizing drug.

I myself have known some profoundly thoughtful dogs.

A husband should not insult his wife publicly, at parties. He should insult her in the privacy of the home.

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

A lady of 47 who has been married 27 years and has six children knows what love really is and once described it for me like this: 'Love is what you've been through with somebody'.

The whole of Paris is a vast university of Art, Literature and Music... it is worth anyone's while to dally here for years. Paris is a seminar, a post-graduate course in everything.

Women deserve to have more than 12 years between 28 and 40.

These are the days of bootleg love.

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.

I don't believe the writer should know too much where he's going. If he does, he runs into old man blueprint—old man propaganda.

If I have sometimes seemed to make fun of Woman, I assure you it has only been for the purpose of egging her on.

Discussion in America means dissent.

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

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.

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

God bless... God damn.

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.

When man gives up on reforming and inspiring society he also gives up his freedom.

Youcanfooltoomanyofthepeopletoomuchofthetime. See Lincoln 510:35.

What would you do without me? Say 'nothing.'" "Nothing," said the Prince. "Good. Then you're helpless and I'll help you.

I can feel a thing I cannot touch and touch a thing I cannot feel. The first is sad and sorry, the second is your heart.

For one thing, she pronounced flowers 'flars' and I couldn't let it slide.

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.

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.

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.

I do not have a psychiatrist and I do not want one, for the simple reason that if he listened to me long enough, he might become disturbed.

Remember laughter. You'll need it even in the blessed isles of Ever After.

I have figured for you the distance between the horns of a dilemma, night and day, and A and Z. I have computed how far is Up, how long it takes to get Away, and what becomes of Gone. I have discovered the length of the sea serpent, the price of priceless, and the square of the hippopotamus. I know where you are when you are at Sixes and Sevens, how much Is you have to have to make an Are, and how many birds you can catch with the salt in the ocean - 187,796,132, if it would interest you.

Art – the one achievement of man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised

She wasn't much to look at but she was something to think about.