James Thurber Quotes
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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.
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Early to rise and early to bed makes a man healthy, wealthy, and dead.
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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.
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The most dangerous food is wedding cake.
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Humor and pathos, tears and laughter are, in the highest expression of human character and achievement, inseparable.
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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.
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A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption.
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Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?
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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.
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We all have faults, and mine is being wicked.
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I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere.
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Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.
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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.
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Don't count your boobies until they are hatched.
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You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
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I am not a dog lover. A dog lover to me means a dog that is in love with another dog.
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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.
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One martini is all right. Two are too many, and three are not enough.
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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?'
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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.
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All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.
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But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?
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When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.
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The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.