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 other.
—James Thurber
Topics: Language
Love is what you’ve been through with somebody.
—James Thurber
Topics: Love
Comedy has to be done en clair. You can’t blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediately clear.
—James Thurber
Topics: Wit, Comedy
Humor is a serious thing. I like to think of it as one of our greatest earliest natural resources, which must be preserved at all cost.
—James Thurber
Topics: Humor
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
All men should strive to learn, before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why.
—James Thurber
Topics: Purpose, Self-Discovery, Discovery
All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.
—James Thurber
Topics: Hate
Sophistication might be described as the ability to cope gracefully with a situation involving the presence of a formidable menace to one’s poise and prestige (such as the butler, or the man under the bed—but never the husband).
—James Thurber
Topics: Class
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.
—James Thurber
Topics: Theater
Discussion in America means dissent.
—James Thurber
Topics: Dissent
Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.
—James Thurber
Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.
—James Thurber
Topics: Silence
You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
—James Thurber
Topics: Trust, Lying, Lies
Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?
—James Thurber
Topics: Conflict
From one casual of mine he picked this sentence. “After dinner, the men moved into the living room.” I explained to the professor that this was Ross’s way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up. There must, as we know, be a comma after every move, made by men, on this earth.
—James Thurber
Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.
—James Thurber
Topics: Women
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.
—James Thurber
Topics: Dignity
There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.
—James Thurber
Topics: Safety
It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
—James Thurber
Topics: Questions
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.
—James Thurber
Topics: Drawing, The Artist
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
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: Age, Women, Aging
From now on, I think it is safe to predict, neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party will ever nominate for President a candidate without good looks, stage presence, theatrical delivery, and a sense of timing.
—James Thurber
Topics: Presidency
I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.
—James Thurber
Topics: Reading, Books
Art—the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.
—James Thurber
Topics: Arts, Artists, Art
In his grief over the loss of a dog. a little boy stands for the first time on tiptoe, peering into the rueful morrow of manhood.
—James Thurber
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
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
Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.
—James Thurber
Topics: Thought, Thinking
A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn’t make sense.
—James Thurber
Topics: Wisdom
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