"But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?"

Thurber, James on Death and Dying
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 2 fans >>

"Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead."

Thurber, James on Death and Dying
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 1 fans >>

"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."

Thurber, James on Dignity
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 0 fans >>

"Discussion in America means dissent."

Thurber, James on Dissent
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 1 fans >>

"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."

Thurber, James on Drawing
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 0 fans >>

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

Thurber, James on Drawing
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 0 fans >>

"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."

Thurber, James on Economy and Economics
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 0 fans >>

"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?"

Thurber, James on Editing and Editors
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 0 fans >>

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

Thurber, James on Age and Aging
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 0 fans >>

"I'm 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be 48. That's 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."

Thurber, James on Age and Aging
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 0 fans >>

"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."

Thurber, James on Alcohol and Alcoholism
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 1 fans >>

"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 Ross's 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."

Thurber, James on Grammar
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 0 fans >>

"One has but to observe a community of beavers at work in a stream to understand the loss in his sagacity, balance, co-operation, competence, and purpose which Man has suffered since he rose up on his hind legs. He began to chatter and he developed Reason, Thought, and Imagination, qualities which would get the smartest group of rabbits or orioles in the world into inextricable trouble overnight."

Thurber, James on Humankind
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 0 fans >>

"Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility."

Thurber, James on Humor
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 2 fans >>

"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."

Thurber, James on Humor
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 0 fans >>

"It is better to have loafed and lost than never to have loafed at all."

Thurber, James on Idleness
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 0 fans >>

"He who hesitates is sometimes saved."

Thurber, James on Indecision
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 0 fans >>

"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."

Thurber, James on Interviews
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 0 fans >>

"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."

Thurber, James on Laughter
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 0 fans >>

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

Thurber, James on Laughter
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 2 fans >>

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

Thurber, James on Lies and Lying
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 1 fans >>

"Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness."

Thurber, James on Anger
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 0 fans >>

"The difference between our decadence and the Russians is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic."

Thurber, James on Apathy
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 0 fans >>

"There are two kinds of light -- the glow that illumines, and the glare that obscures."

Thurber, James on Light
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 2 fans >>

"Love is the strange bewilderment that overtakes one person on account of another person."

Thurber, James on Love
Talk about quote · Email to friend · 0 fans >>