I 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.
JAMES THURBERMan has gone long enough, or even too long, without being man enough to face the simple truth that the trouble with man is man.
More James Thurber Quotes
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The difference between our decadence and the Russians is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.
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If you wonder which is the stronger sex, watch which one twists the other around her little finger.
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One martini is all right. Two are too many, and three are not enough.
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Americans want to go to heaven without dying.
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Humor is a serious thing. I like to think of it as one of our greatest earliest natural resources, which must be preserved at all cost.
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Love is what you’ve been through with somebody.
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The most dangerous food is wedding cake.
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If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
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You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.
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Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.
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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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With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.
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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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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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I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.
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Mutual suspicions of mental inadequacy are common during the first year of any marriage.
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Man is troubled by what might be called the Dog Wish, a strange and involved compulsion to be as happy and carefree as a dog.
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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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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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A pinch of probability is worth a pound of perhaps.
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Two is company, four is a party, three is a crowd. One is a wanderer.
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Somebody has said that woman’s place is in the wrong. That’s fine. What the wrong needs is a woman’s presence and a woman’s touch. She is far better equipped than men to set it right.
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Beautiful things don’t ask for attention.
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I never really rallied after the birth of my first child.
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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.
JAMES THURBER