A burden in the bush is worth two on your hands.
--James Thurber
A little crotch kicking is a good thing, if done in anger. I can't stand guys who are merely piqued by the unforgivable...
--James Thurber
A man's bed is his cradle, but a woman's is often her rack.
--James Thurber
A pinch of probably is worth a pound of perhaps.
--James Thurber
A woman's place is in the wrong.
--James Thurber
A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn't make any sense.
--James Thurber
All men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.
--James Thurber
American college students are like American colleges; each has half-dulled faculties.
--James Thurber
But what is all this fear of and opposition to oblivion? What is the matter with the soft darkness, the dreamless sleep?
--James Thurber
Childhood used to end with the discovery that there is no Santa Claus. Nowadays, it often ends when the child gets his first adult, the way Hemingway got his first rhino, with the difference that the rhino was charging Hemingway, whereas the adult is usually running away from the child.
--James Thurber
Discussion in America means dissent.
--James Thurber
Do not look back in anger, or forward in fear, but around in awareness.
--James Thurber
Don't count your boobies until they are hatched.
--James Thurber
Don't get it right, just get it written.
--James Thurber
Don't let the chip on your shoulder be your only reason for walking erect.
--James Thurber
Early to rise and early to bed makes a man healthy and wealthy and dead.
--James Thurber
He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes.
--James Thurber
He who hesitates is sometimes saved.
--James Thurber
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.
--James Thurber
Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.
--James Thurber
Humor is, I think, the subtlest and chanciest of literary forms. It is surely not accidental that there are a thousand novelists, essayists, poets or journalists for each humorist. It is a long, long time between James Thurbers.
--Leo Rosten
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.
--James Thurber
I hate women because they always know where things are.
--James Thurber
I loathe the expression 'What makes him tick.' It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm.
--James Thurber
I spit on the grave of my awful forties.
(on turning 50).
--James Thurber
I suppose that even the most pleasurable of imaginable occupations, that of batting baseballs through the windows of the RCA Building, would pall a little as the days ran on.
--James Thurber
I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere.
--James Thurber
I wouldn't go down there if they was Fig Newtons down there.
--James Thurber
If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
--James Thurber
In his grief over the loss of a dog, a little boy stands for the first time on tiptoe, peering into the rueful morrow of manhood. After this most inconsolable of sorrows there is nothing life can do to him that he will not be able somehow to bear.
--James Thurber
It had only one fault. It was kind of lousy.
--James Thurber
It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all the answers.
--James Thurber
Love is blind, but desire just doesn't give a good goddam.
--James Thurber
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.
--James Thurber
Men are more interesting than women, but women are more fascinating.
--James Thurber
Nowadays men live lives of noisy desperation.
--James Thurber
One (martini) is all right, two is too many, three is not enough.
--James Thurber
Our love never ripened into friendship.
--James Thurber
Precision of communication is important, more important than ever, in our era of hair trigger balances, when a false or misunderstood word may create as much disaster as a sudden thoughtless act.
--James Thurber
She said he proposed something on their wedding night her own brother wouldn't have suggested.
--James Thurber
She who goes unarmed in paradise had better be sure that is where she is.
--James Thurber
Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.
--James Thurber
So much has already been written about everything that you can't find out anything about it.
--James Thurber
Sometimes the news from Washington forces me to the conclusion that your mother and your brother Ed are in charge.
(cartoon caption).
--James Thurber
The difference between our decadence and the Russians is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.
--James Thurber
The human being says that the beast in him has been aroused, when what he actually means is that the human being in him has been aroused.
--James Thurber
The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms- hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal.
--James Thurber
The material on me... was so extensive that the writer couldn't find anything he was looking for, and, with data up to his waist, had to guess and make things up.
--James Thurber
The most dangerous food is wedding cake.
--James Thurber
The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.
--James Thurber
The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.
--James Thurber
The saddest words of pen or tongue are wisdom's wasted on the young.
--James Thurber
The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself.
--James Thurber
The written word will soon disappear and we'll no longer be able to read good prose like we used to could. This prospect does not gentle my thoughts or tranquil me toward the future.
--James Thurber
There are two kinds of light- the glow that illumines, and the glare that obscures.
--James Thurber
There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.
--James Thurber
There is something about a poet which leads us to believe that he died, in many cases, as long as twenty years before his birth.
--James Thurber
We must all study German. When Fate knocks in German, by God you hear it.
--James Thurber
What this country needs is a good detached retinue.
(to his ophthalmologist).
--James Thurber
When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.
--James Thurber
Where did you get those big brown eyes and that tiny mind? (cartoon caption).
--James Thurber
Where most of us end up there is no knowing, but the hell-bent get where they are going.
--James Thurber
Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?
--James Thurber
Women deserve to have more than 12 years between the ages of 28 and 40.
--James Thurber
You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
--James Thurber
You can tell where I get my ideas from the things I write, and then you will know as much about it as I do.
--James Thurber
You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.
--James Thurber
Found 67 occurence(s) in 52,450 quotation(s).