James Thurber
Time is for dragonflies and angels. The former live too little and the latter live too long.Collection: Time
The dog has got more fun out of Man than Man has got out of the dog, for the clearly demonstrable reason that Man is the more laughable of the two animalsCollection: Dog
He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes.Collection: Art
Quick, name some towns in New JerseyCollection: Names
The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms -hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal.Collection: Laughter
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.Collection: Reading
Humor and pathos, tears and laughter are, in the highest expression of human character and achievement, inseparable.Collection: Laughter
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.Collection: Writing
Where most of us end up there is no knowing, but the hellbent get where they are going.Collection: Knowing
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.Collection: Mother
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.Collection: Fall
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.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Powerful
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.Collection: Sad
Dogs are obsessed with being happy.Collection: Dog
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.Collection: Taken
Somebody has said that woman's place is in the wrong. That's fine. What the wrong needs is a woman's presence and a woman's touch. She is far better equipped than men to set it right.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Eye
When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.Collection: Writing
The unicorn is a mythical beast.Collection: Mythical Beasts
Comedy has ceased to be a challenge to the mental processes. It has become a therapy of relaxation, a kind of tranquilizing drug.Collection: Humor
My grandmother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house. It leaked, she contended, out of empty sockets if the wall switch had been left on. She would go around screwing in bulbs, and if they lighted up, she would fearfully turn off the wall switch and go back to her Pearson's or Everybody's, happy in the satisfaction that she had stopped not only a costly but dangerous leakage. nothing could ever clear this up for her.Collection: Wall
It did not take Man long-probably not more than a hundred centuries-to discover that all the animals except the dog were impossible around the house. One has but to spend a few days with an aardvark or llama, command a water buffalo to sit up and beg or try to housebreak a moose, to perceive how wisely Man set about his process of elimination and selection.Collection: Dog
I make mistakes, but I am on the side of Good," the Golux said, "by accident and happenchance. I had high hopes of being Evil when I was two, but in my youth I came upon a firefly burning in a spider's web. I saved the victim's life." "The firefly's ?" said the minstrel. "The spider's. The blinking arsonist had set the web on fire.Collection: Mistake
A peril of the night road is that flecks of dust and streaks of bug blood on the windshield look to me like old admirals in uniform, or crippled apple women, or the front edge of barges, and I whirl out of their way, thus going into ditches and fields and up on front lawns, endangering the life of authentic admirals and apple women who may be out on the roads for a breath of air before retiring.Collection: Night
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.Collection: Sorry
(Cartoon caption:) I never really rallied after the birth of my first child.Collection: Children
I was seized by the stern hand of Compulsion, that dark, unreasonable Urge that impels women to clean house in the middle of the night.Collection: Funny
Youcanfooltoomanyofthepeopletoomuchofthetime. See Lincoln 510:35.Collection: Time
Columbus is a town in which almost anything is likely to happen, and in which almost everything has.Collection: Towns
A husband should not insult his wife publicly, at parties. He should insult her in the privacy of the home.Collection: Husband
A wet dog is lovingest.Collection: Dog
It had only one fault. It was kind of lousy.Collection: Kindness
American girls often marry someone they can't stand to spite someone they can.Collection: Girl
If I have sometimes seemed to make fun of Woman, I assure you it has only been for the purpose of egging her on.Collection: Fun
I drew pictures rapidly and with few lines, because I had to write most of the pieces, too, and couldn't monkey long with the drawings. The divine urge was no higher than that.Collection: Writing
A woman's place is in the wrong.Collection: Women
I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age.Collection: Age
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.Collection: Lonely
In the pathways between office and home and home and the houses of settled people there are always, ready to snap at you, the little perils of routine living, but there is no escape in the unplanned tangent, the sudden turn.Collection: Home
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.Collection: Art
It takes that je ne sais quoi which we call sophistication for a woman to be magnificent in a drawing-room when her faculties have departed but she herself has not yet gone home.Collection: Home
God bless... God damn.Collection: Death
We all know that the theater and every play that comes to Broadway have within themselves, like the human being, the seed of self-destruction and the certainty of death. The thing is to see how long the theater, the play, and the human being can last in spite of themselves.Collection: Play
Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the otherCollection: Sex
My drawings have been described as pre-internationalist, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point.Collection: Ideas
What would you do without me? Say 'nothing.'" "Nothing," said the Prince. "Good. Then you're helpless and I'll help you.Collection: Helping
I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand.Collection: Hands
I hate women because they have brought into the currency of our language such expressions as "all righty" and "yes indeedy" and hundreds of others.Collection: Hate