James Thurber Quotes

“Two is company, four is a party, three is a crowd. One is a wanderer.”

— James Thurber

“Walter Mitty: To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other, and to feel. That is the purpose of life.”

— James Thurber

“If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.”

— James Thurber

“Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?”

— James Thurber

“Remember laughter. You'll need it even in the blessed isles of Ever After.”

— James Thurber

You can fool too many people, too much of the time.

— James Thurber

“I can feel a thing I cannot touch and touch a thing I cannot feel. The first is sad and sorry, the second is your heart.”

— James Thurber

I am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance - a sharp, vindictive glance.

— 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

“I hate women because they always remember where things are.”

— James Thurber

“It was Lisa, aged five, whose mother asked her to thank my wife for the peas we had sent them from our garden. 'I thought the peas were awful, I wish you and Mrs. Thurber were dead, and I hate trees,' said Lisa.”

— James Thurber

“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. After this most inconsolable of sorrows there is nothing life can do to him that he will not be able somehow to bear.”

— James Thurber

“A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption.
A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn't make sense.”

— 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

“At forty my faculties may have closed up like flowers at evening, leaving me unable to write my memoirs with a fitting and discreet inaccuracy, or, having written them, unable to carry them to the publisher.”

— James Thurber

“I don't remember any blue poodles.”

— James Thurber

It is hard for me to believe that Miss Groby ever saw any work of literature from far enough away to know what it meant. She was forever climbing up the margins of books and crawling between their lines for the little gold of phrase, making marks with a pencil. As Palamides hunted the Questing Beast, she hunted the Figure of Speech. She hunted it through the clangorous halls of Shakespeare and through the green forests of Scott.

— James Thurber

“Geep,' whuppled the parrot.”

— James Thurber

“Progress was all right. Only it went on too long.”

— James Thurber

“Man has always assumed that his is the highest form of life in the universe. There is, of course, nothing at all with which to sustain this view.”

— James Thurber

“Books can be burned," croaked Black.
"They have a way of rising from the ashes," said Andreus.”

— James Thurber

“Man is troubled by what might be called the Dog Wish, a strange and involved compulsion to be as happy and carefree as a dog.”

— James 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. His hands were as cold as his smile and almost as cold as his heart. He wore gloves when he was asleep, and he wore gloves when he was awake, which made if difficult for him to pick up pins or coins or the kernels of nuts, or to tear the wings from nightingales. He was six feet four, and forty-six, and even colder than he thought he was.”

— James Thurber

“She has a memory of trees and fields and nothing more.”

— James Thurber

“I would be the last person to say that madness is not a solution.”

— James Thurber

“At least she's not guilty of integrity, and that's more than I can say of any Bell in four generations except my grandfather and myself.”

— James Thurber

“The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal.”

— James Thurber

Laughter need not be cut out of anything, since it improves everything.

— James 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.

— James Thurber

“Unless artists can remember what it was to be a little boy, they are only half complete as artist and as man.”

— James Thurber

“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

The whole of Paris is a vast university of Art, Literature and Music ... it is worth anyone's while to dally here for years. Paris is a seminar, a post-graduate course in everything.

— James Thurber

“American girls often marry someone they can't stand to spite someone they can.”

— James Thurber

The paths of glory at least lead to the Grave, but the paths of duty may not get you Anywhere.

— 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

“I'm sixty-five and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics, but if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be forty-eight.”

— James Thurber

“Humor and pathos, tears and laughter are, in the highest expression of human character and achievement, inseparable.”

— 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

“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

“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

“Women deserve to have more than 12 years between 28 and 40.”

— James Thurber

“I write humor the way a surgeon operates, because it is a livelihood, because I have a great urge to do it, because many interesting challenges are set up, and because I have the hope it may do some good.”

— James Thurber

“So much has already been written about everything that you can't find out anything about it.”

— James Thurber

“(Cartoon caption I never really rallied after the birth of my first child.”

— James Thurber

“A woman's place is in the wrong.”

— James Thurber

“When man gives up on reforming and inspiring society he also gives up his freedom.”

— James Thurber

“Americans want to go to heaven without dying.”

— 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

“Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counselling 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

“My grandmother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house. It leaked, she contended, out of empty sockets if the wall switch had been left on. She would go around screwing in bulbs, and if they lighted up, she would fearfully turn off the wall switch and go back to her Pearson's or Everybody's, happy in the satisfaction that she had stopped not only a costly but dangerous leakage. nothing could ever clear this up for her.”

— James Thurber