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: Alcoholism, Alcohol
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
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
Comedy has ceased to be a challenge to the mental processes. It has become a therapy of relaxation, a kind of tranquilizing drug.
—James Thurber
Topics: Humor
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
You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.
—James Thurber
Topics: Balance, Persuasion, Risk
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: Economics, Economy
The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.
—James Thurber
Topics: Comedy
Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.
—James Thurber
Topics: Writers, Writing, Authors & Writing
When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.
—James Thurber
Topics: Writers, Writing, Authors & Writing
The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody’s guess
—James Thurber
Topics: Future
Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.
—James Thurber
Topics: Humor
It’s better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
—James Thurber
Topics: Questions, Questioning, Thinking
The difference between our decadence and the Russians is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.
—James Thurber
Topics: Apathy
This is the posture of fortune’s slaves: one foot in the gravy, one foot in the grave.
—James Thurber
Topics: Fortune
All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.
—James Thurber
Topics: Hate
My opposition [to interviews] lies in the fact that offhand answers have little value or grace of expression, and that such oral give and take helps to perpetuate the decline of the English language.
—James Thurber
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
Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.
—James Thurber
Topics: Thinking, Thought
We are a nation that has always gone in for the loud laugh, the wow, the yak, the belly laugh, and the dozen other labels for the roll- em-in-the-aisles gagerissimo. This is the kind of laugh that delights actors, directors, and producers, but dismays writers of comedy because it is the laugh that often dies in the lobby. The appreciative smile, the chuckle, the soundless mirth, so important to the success of comedy, cannot be understood unless one sits among the audience and feels the warmth created by the quality of laughter that the audience takes home with it.
—James Thurber
Topics: Audiences, Laughter
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 laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms—hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal.
—James Thurber
Topics: Laughter
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
I love the idea of there being two sexes, don’t you?
—James Thurber
Topics: Men, Men & Women, Women
Love is the strange bewilderment that overtakes one person on account of another person.
—James Thurber
Topics: Love
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
Philosophy offers the rather cold consolation that perhaps we and our planet do not actually exist; religion presents the contradictory and scarcely more comforting thought that we exist but that we cannot hope to get anywhere until we cease to exist. Alcohol, in attempting to resolve the contradiction, produces vivid patterns of Truth which vanish like snow in the morning sun and cannot be recalled; the revelations of poetry are as wonderful as a comet in the skies—and as mysterious. Love, which was once believed to contain the Answer, we now know to be nothing more than an inherited behavior pattern.
—James Thurber
Topics: The Universe
Love is what you’ve been through with somebody.
—James Thurber
Topics: Love
Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.
—James Thurber
Every man is occasionally visited by the suspicion that the planet on which he is riding is not really going anywhere; that the Force which controls its measured eccentricities hasn’t got anything special in mind. If he broods on this somber theme long enough he gets the doleful idea that the laughing children on a merry-go-round or the thin, fine hands of a lady’s watch are revolving more purposely than he is.
—James Thurber
Topics: Purpose
I loathe the expression “What makes him tick.” It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution, 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.
—James Thurber
Topics: Self-Discovery
While he was not as dumb as an ox, he was not any smarter either.
—James Thurber
Topics: Character
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
Next to reasoning, the greatest handicap to the optimum development of Man lies in the fact that this planet is just barely habitable. Its minimum temperatures are too low, and its maximum temperatures too high. Its day is not long enough, and its night is too long. The disposition of its water and earth is distinctly unfortunate (the existence of the Mediterranean Sea in the place where we find it is perhaps the unhappiest accident in the whole firmament). These factors encourage depression, fear, war, and lack of vitality. They describe a planet, which is by no means perfectly devised for the nurturing or for the perpetuation of a higher intelligence.
—James Thurber
Topics: World
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: Flying, Tourism, Travel
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.
—James Thurber
He was always leaning forward, pushing something invisible ahead of him.
—James Thurber
Topics: Attitude
You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
—James Thurber
Topics: Trust, Lying, Lies