James Thurber – Quotes Crazy

Its a na?ve domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think youll be amused by its presumption. – 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

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

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

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

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 Rosss 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

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

Im 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were fifteen months in every year, Id only be 48. Thats 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

Love is what youve been through with somebody. – James Thurber

The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybodys guess. – James Thurber

Comedy has to be done en clair. You cant 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

I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere. – 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

All men should strive to learn before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why. – 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 nation that complacently and fearfully allows its artists and writers to become suspected rather than respected is no longer regarded as a nation possessed with humor or depth. – James Thurber

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

Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility. – James Thurber

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