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Humor and pathos, tears and laughter are, in the highest expression of human character and achievement, inseparable.
James Thurber -
Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.
James Thurber
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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 -
A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption.
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 -
Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.
James Thurber -
We all have faults, and mine is being wicked.
James Thurber -
Early to rise and early to bed makes a man healthy, wealthy, and dead.
James Thurber
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Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?
James Thurber -
I am not a dog lover. A dog lover to me means a dog that is in love with another dog.
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 think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere.
James Thurber -
Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counseling 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 -
One martini is all right. Two are too many, and three are not enough.
James Thurber
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The most dangerous food is wedding cake.
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 -
He picked out this sentence in a New Yorker casual of mine: 'After dinner, the men moved into the living room,' and he wanted to know why I, or the editors, had put in the comma. I could explain that one all night. I wrote back that this particular comma was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.
James Thurber -
Moral: Where most of us end up there is no knowing, but the hellbent get where they are going.
James Thurber -
I hate women because they always know where things are.
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
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It is better to have loafed and lost, than never to have loafed at all.
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 -
He who hesitates is sometimes saved.
James Thurber -
All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.
James Thurber