James Thurber Quotes (137 Quotes)

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.

Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself in a great rear end collision.

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.

Her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house.

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 Rose' 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.

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.

With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.

All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.

I think that if he doesn't do well with the high-profile races where he's appearing, it could hurt him.

You wait here and I'll bring the etchings down.

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

Well if this is the wrong number, why did you answer it.

Then, with that faint fleeting smile playing about his lips, he faced the firing squad erect and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty, the undefeated, inscrutable to the last.

But those rare souls whose spirit gets magically into the hearts of men, leave behind them something more real and warmly personal than bodily presence, an ineffable and eternal thing. It is everlasting life touching us as something more than a vague, recondite concept. The sound of a great name dies like an echo the splendor of fame fades into nothing but the grace of a fine spirit pervades the places through which it has passed, like the haunting loveliness of mignonette.

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.

A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption.

There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.

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.

Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?

Bush is trying to get more support generally from the American public by seeming more moderate and showing he's a strong leader at the same time he has a rebellion within his own party. The far right is starting to be very open about their claim that he's not a real conservative.

It's like Tito leaving Yugoslavia. He ruled with fear, and so did Tom DeLay. Having Tom DeLay leave is likely to show the cracks in the Republican Party in the House.

God bless ... God damn.

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.

A burden in the bush is worth two on your hands.

Discussion in America means dissent.

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

Last night I dreamed of a small consolation enjoyed only by the blind: Nobody knows the trouble I've not seen!

Comedy has to be done en clair. You can't blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediately clear.

Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.

One martini is all right. Two are too many, and three are not enough.

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.

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

You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.

And the little girl had approached the bed no nearer than thirty feet when she pulled out a pistol and shot the wolf dead for even in a cap and nightgown a wolf looks no more like your grandmother than Calvin Coolidge looks like the Metro-Goldwyn lion. Moral Little girls are not so easy to fool nowadays as they used to be.

Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man.

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.

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

While he was not as dumb as an ox, he was not any smarter either.

The most dangerous food is wedding cake.

Early to rise and early to bed makes a man healthy, wealthy, and dead.

Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.

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.

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.

As the Justice Department gets closer and closer to him through his aides, and if he is in more trouble, certainly the Democrats will use that.

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

Boys are beyond the range of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years.

From now on, I think it is safe to predict, neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party will ever nominate for President a candidate without good looks, stage presence, theatrical delivery, and a sense of timing.

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.

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

The dog has seldom been successful in pulling man up to its level of sagacity, but man has frequently dragged the dog down to his.