If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
thurber quotes
thurber
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.
thurber quotes:
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.
thurber quotes:
j thurber
Her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house.
thurber quotes:
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.
thurber quotes:
j thurber
The story of Harold Ross, the New Yorker and me is a mere footnote to the story of our time, and we might as well face the truth that to researchers of the future, poking about among the ruins of time, we shall all be tiny glitters. But then, so are diamonds.
thurber quotes:
thurber, on new yorker editor harold ross, "my years with ross"
Discussion in America means dissent.
thruber quotes:
thruber
If you should walk and wind and wander far enough on one of those afternoons in April when smoke goes down instead of up, and nearby things sound far away and far things near, you are more than likely to come at last to the enchanted forest that lies between the Moonstone Mines and Centaurs Mountain..
thurber quotes:
j thurber, "the white deer" (opening passage)
And the little girl had approached the bed no nearer than thirty feet when she pulled out a pistol and shot the wolf dead; for even in a cap and nightgown a wolf looks no more like your grandmother than Calvin Coolidge looks like the Metro-Goldwyn lion.
Moral: Little girls are not so easy to fool nowadays as they used to be.
thurber quotes, fables for our time, 1940
I do not have a psychiatrist and I do not want one, for the simple reason that if he listened to me long enough, he might become disturbed.
thurber quotes:
thurber
Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquillity.
thurber quotes:
j thurber (similar to the quote: "comedy is tragedy plus time."
The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself.
thurber quotes:
thurber quotes, "Carpe Noctem, If You Can", thurber quotes in "Credos and Curios," 1962
Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?
thurber quotes:
thurber
A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption.
thurber quotes:
thurber
But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?
thurber quotes:
j thurber
The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.
thurber quotes:
thurber
Once upon a time, in a gloomy castle on a lonely hill, where there were thirteen clocks that wouldn't go, there lived a cold, aggressive Duke, and his niece, the Princess Saralinda. She was warm in every wind and weather, but he was always cold.
thurber quotes:
thurber, "the 13 clocks" (opening passage)
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.
thurber quotes:
j thurber quotes
Boys are beyond the range of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years.
thurber quotes:
thurber
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 Rose' 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.
thurber quotes:
thurber
I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere.
thurber quotes:
j thurber
It's a naive domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.
thurber quotes:
thurber
My drawings have been described as pre-intentionalist, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point.
thurber quotes:
j thurber
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.
thurber quotes:
thurber
No other editor has ever been lost and saved so often in the course of a working week. When his heart leaped up, it leaped a long way, because it started from so far down, and its commutings over the years from the depths to the heights made Ross a specialist in appreciation.
thurber quotes:
j thurber, new yorker editor harold ross, "my years with ross"
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.
thruber quotes:
thruber
The train was twenty minutes late, we found out when we bought our tickets, so we sat down on a bench in the little waiting room of the Cornwall Bridge station. It was too hot outside in the sun. This midsummer Saturday had got off to a sulky start, and now, at three in the afternoon, it sat, sticky and restive, in our laps.
thurber quotes:
j thurber, "the thurber carnival" (opening passage)