If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
JAMES THURBERI 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.
More James Thurber Quotes
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Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.
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Americans want to go to heaven without dying.
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I don’t believe the writer should know too much where he’s going. If he does, he runs into old man blueprintold man propaganda.
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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.
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Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.
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You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
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Comedy has ceased to be a challenge to the mental processes. It has become a therapy of relaxation, a kind of tranquilizing drug.
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For one thing, she pronounced flowers ‘flars’ and I couldn’t let it slide.
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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.
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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.
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Don’t get it right, just get it written.
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I never quite know when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, “Dammit, Thurber, stop writing.” She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph.
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I am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance – a sharp, vindictive glance.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Don’t count your boobies until they are hatched.
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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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There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.
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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.
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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.
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Mutual suspicions of mental inadequacy are common during the first year of any marriage.
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There are two kinds of light – the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.
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Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.
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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.
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Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.
JAMES THURBER