But those rare souls whose spirit gets magically into the hearts of men, leave behind them something more real and warmly personal than bodily presence, an ineffable and eternal thing. It is everlasting life touching us as something more than a vague, recondite concept. The sound of a great name dies like an echo; the splendor of fame fades into nothing; but the grace of a fine spirit pervades the places through which it has passed, like the haunting loveliness of mignonette.
—James Thurber
Topics: Spirituality, Spirit
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
Humor does not include sarcasm, invalid irony, sardonicism, innuendo, or any other form of cruelty. When these things are raised to a high point they can become wit, but unlike the French and the English, we have not been much good at wit since the days of Benjamin Franklin.
—James Thurber
Topics: Humor, Wit
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
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 animals.
—James Thurber
Topics: Dogs
But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?
—James Thurber
Topics: Dying, Death
The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.
—James Thurber
Topics: Comedy
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.
—James Thurber
Topics: Driving
This is the posture of fortune’s slaves: one foot in the gravy, one foot in the grave.
—James Thurber
Topics: Fortune
I’m 65 and I guess that puts me in the geriatrics. But if there were 15 months in the 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 12 years between the ages of 28 and 40.
—James Thurber
Topics: Aging, Women, Age
Boys are beyond the range of anybody’s sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years.
—James Thurber
Topics: Youth
Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counseling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, “How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style?” and avoid “How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?”
—James Thurber
Topics: Authors & Writing
It’s better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
—James Thurber
Topics: Questioning, Questions, Thinking
When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.
—James Thurber
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writing, Writers
He who hesitates is sometimes saved.
—James Thurber
Topics: Indecision
Love is what you’ve been through with somebody.
—James Thurber
Topics: Love
Discussion in America means dissent.
—James Thurber
Topics: Dissent
A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn’t make sense.
—James Thurber
Topics: Wisdom
The animals that depend on instinct have an inherent knowledge of the laws of economics and of how to apply them; Man, with his powers of reason, has reduced economics to the level of a farce which is at once funnier and more tragic than Tobacco Road.
—James Thurber
Topics: Economy, Economics
Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.
—James Thurber
Topics: Silence
He was always leaning forward, pushing something invisible ahead of him.
—James Thurber
Topics: Attitude
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
Topics: Humankind, Humanity
With 60 staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs.
—James Thurber
Topics: Aging, Writing, Age
Precision of communication is important, more important than ever in our era of hair-trigger balances, when a false, or misunderstood word may create as much disaster as a sudden thoughtless act.
—James Thurber
Topics: Communication
Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself in a great rear end collision.
—James Thurber
Topics: Tourism, Travel, Flying
There are two kinds of light—the glow that illumines, and the glare that obscures.
—James Thurber
Topics: Light
The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people—that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature.
—James Thurber
Topics: Humor
Let us not look back to the past with anger, nor towards the future with fear, but look around with awareness
—James Thurber
Topics: Awareness
Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.
—James Thurber
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.
—James Thurber
Topics: Alcohol, Alcoholism