James Thurber Quotes

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James Thurber

Profession : Author

Birth : December 8, 1894

Last night I dreamed of a small consolation enjoyed only by the blind: Nobody knows the trouble I've not seen!

James Thurber

Speed is scarcely the noblest virtue of graphic composition, but it has its curious rewards. There is a sense of getting somewhere fast, which satisfies a native American urge.

James Thurber

With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.

James Thurber

The sanity of the average banquet speaker lasts about two and a half months; at the end of that time he begins to mutter to himself, and calls out in his sleep.

James Thurber

A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption.

James Thurber

But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?

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

I used to wake up at 4 A.M. and start sneezing, sometimes for five hours. I tried to find out what sort of allergy I had but finally came to the conclusion that it must be an allergy to consciousness.

James Thurber

The dog has seldom been successful in pulling man up to its level of sagacity, but man has frequently dragged the dog down to his.

James Thurber

Discussion in America means dissent.

James Thurber

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

All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.

James Thurber

Love is the strange bewilderment that overtakes one person on account of another person.

James Thurber

Man has gone long enough, or even too long, without being man enough to face the simple truth that the trouble with man is man.

James Thurber

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

There is something about a poet which leads us to believe that he died, in many cases, as long as 20 years before his birth.

James Thurber

I'm 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were fifteen months in every 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 twelve years between the ages of 28 and 40.

James Thurber

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

The difference between our decadence and the Russians' is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.

James Thurber