James Thurber Quotations | Page 2

They don't care about (Bush's) legacy. They care about getting re-elected.

There is, of course, a certain amount of drudgery in newspaper work, just as there is in teaching classes, tunneling into a bank, or being President of the United States.

This is the most important turning point for his administration in terms of turning down and losing support.

It is perhaps the last frontier of essentially unregulated campaign cash contributions.

It's made it more difficult for his agenda generally and it certainly has made it more difficult in the Supreme Court nomination battle. As we've seen with other presidents, when presidents encounter serious difficulties, they tend to have to compromise.

It's going to be almost impossible to overcome the perception about the president that he didn't show compassion and didn't get control of the policy failures. The vivid images that are coming across the television are really destroying his image as a leader.

The news of continuing deaths cannot be overcome by speeches.

It's a naive domestic little Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption

The vivid images that are coming across the television are really destroying his image as a leader.

This is a very black day for the White House, and it's going to be very hard for the president to dig out of this. Bush is in trouble. He is going to have a difficult time moving any part of his domestic agenda.

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

He's very bright, but he's too extreme for a lot of people,

The chill Miss Trent has her men frustrated to a point at which a mortal male would smack her little mouth, so smooth, so firm, so free of nicotine, alcohol and emotion.

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

She wasn't much to look at but she was something to think about.

Art – the one achievement of man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised

I have figured for you the distance between the horns of a dilemma, night and day, and A and Z. I have computed how far is Up, how long it takes to get Away, and what becomes of Gone. I have discovered the length of the sea serpent, the price of priceless, and the square of the hippopotamus. I know where you are when you are at Sixes and Sevens, how much Is you have to have to make an Are, and how many birds you can catch with the salt in the ocean - 187,796,132, if it would interest you.

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

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.

You are all a lost generation," Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. We weren't lost. We knew where we were, all right, but we wouldn't go home. Ours was the generation that stayed up all night.

Authors of light pieces have, nobody knows why, a genius for getting into minor difficulties: they walk into the wrong apartments, they drink furniture polish for stomach bitters, they drive their cars into the prize tulip beds of haughty neighbors, they playfully slap gangsters, mistaking them for old school friends.

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.

For one thing, she pronounced flowers 'flars' and I couldn't let it slide.

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.

What would you do without me? Say 'nothing.'" "Nothing," said the Prince. "Good. Then you're helpless and I'll help you.

Youcanfooltoomanyofthepeopletoomuchofthetime. See Lincoln 510:35.

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

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.

God bless... God damn.

He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes.

I loathe the expression “What makes him tick.” It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solutions, 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.

It had only one fault. It was kind of lousy.

Discussion in America means dissent.

If I have sometimes seemed to make fun of Woman, I assure you it has only been for the purpose of egging her on.

I don't believe the writer should know too much where he's going. If he does, he runs into old man blueprint—old man propaganda.

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.

These are the days of bootleg love.

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

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.

A lady of 47 who has been married 27 years and has six children knows what love really is and once described it for me like this: 'Love is what you've been through with somebody'.

Love is blind, but desire just doesn't give a good goddamn

A husband should not insult his wife publicly, at parties. He should insult her in the privacy of the home.

I myself have known some profoundly thoughtful dogs.

Comedy has ceased to be a challenge to the mental processes. It has become a therapy of relaxation, a kind of tranquilizing drug.

Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other

A woman's place is in the wrong.

No male can beat a female in the long run because they have it over us in sheer, damn longevity.

Let the meek inherit the earth -- they have it coming to them.

I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand.

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

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.

I love the idea of there being two sexes, don't you?

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.

Columbus is a town in which almost anything is likely to happen, and in which almost everything has.

A pinch of probability is worth a pound of perhaps.

Men are more interesting than women, but women ae more fascinating.

I don't remember any blue poodles.

The act of writing is either something the writer dreads or actually likes, and I actually like it. Even re-writing's fun. You're getting somewhere, whether it seems to move or not.

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

Writers of comedy have outlook, whereas writers of tragedy have, according to them, insight.

Surely no other American institution is so bound around and tightened up by rules, strictures, adages, and superstitions as the Broadway theatre.

Until a man can quit talking loudly to himself in order to shout down the memories of blunderings and gropings, he is in no shape for the painstaking examination of distress.

(Cartoon caption:) I never really rallied after the birth of my first child.

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.

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

The things we laugh at are awful while they are going on, but get funny when we look back. And other people laugh because they've been through it too. The closest thing to humor is tragedy.

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

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.

If you wonder which is the stronger sex, watch which one twists the other around her little finger.

Don't count your boobies until they are hatched.

I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age.

The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.

Looks can be deceiving; it's eating that's believing.

I drew pictures rapidly and with few lines, because I had to write most of the pieces, too, and couldn't monkey long with the drawings. The divine urge was no higher than that.

The Old Man ain’t afraid of hell

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

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.

Somebody has said that woman's place is in the wrong. That's fine. What the wrong needs is a woman's presence and a woman's touch. She is far better equipped than men to set it right.

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.

A wet dog is lovingest.

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.

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.

Muggs was always sorry, Mother said, when he bit someone, but we could never understand how she figured this out. He didn't act sorry.

It did not take Man long-probably not more than a hundred centuries-to discover that all the animals except the dog were impossible around the house. One has but to spend a few days with an aardvark or llama, command a water buffalo to sit up and beg or try to housebreak a moose, to perceive how wisely Man set about his process of elimination and selection.

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.

Americans want to go to heaven without dying.

Though statisticians in our time have never kept the score, Man wants a great deal here below and Woman even more.

If you are a police dog, where's your badge?

I hate women because they have brought into the currency of our language such expressions as "all righty" and "yes indeedy" and hundreds of others.

He had as much fun in the water as any person I have known. You didn't have to throw a stick in the water to get him to go in. Of course, he would bring back a stick to you if you did throw one in. He would even have brought back a piano if you had thrown one in.

Where most of us end up there is no knowing, but the hellbent get where they are going.

The trouble with the lost generation is that it didn't get lost enough.

Most of the faint intimations of immortality of which we are occasionally aware would seem to arise out of Art or the materials of Art.

Dogs are obsessed with being happy.

Every time is a time for comedy in a world of tension that would languish without it. But I cannot confine myself to lightness in a period of human life that demands light ... We all know that, as the old adage has it, "It is later than you think." ..., but I also say occasionally: "It is lighter than you think." In this light let's not look back in anger, or forward in fear, but around in awareness.

I have lived in the East for nearly thirty years now, but many of my books prove that I am never very far away from Ohio in my thoughts, and that the clocks that strike in my dreams are often the clocks of Columbus.

In the pathways between office and home and home and the houses of settled people there are always, ready to snap at you, the little perils of routine living, but there is no escape in the unplanned tangent, the sudden turn.

History is replete with proofs, from Cato the Elder to Kennedy the Younger, that if you scratch a statesman you find an actor, but it is becoming harder and harder, in our time, to tell government from show business.

The unicorn is a mythical beast,

Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street.