James Thurber Quotes - Page 2

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

The trouble with the lost generation is that it didn't get lost enough.

The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.

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

A lady of 47 who has been married 27 years and has six children knows what love really is and once described it for me like this: 'Love is what you've been through with somebody'.

The nation that complacently and fearfully allows its artists and writers to become suspected rather than respected is no longer regarded as a nation possessed with humor or depth.

Two is company, four is a party, three is a crowd. One is a wanderer.

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

The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself.

I'm sixty-five and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics, but if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be forty-eight.

For one thing, she pronounced flowers 'flars' and I couldn't let it slide.

So much has already been written about everything that you can't find out anything about it.

Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.

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.

Progress was all right. Only it went on too long.

Love is what you've been through with somebody.

If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.

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.

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.

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

Humor does not include sarcasm, invalid irony, sardonicism, innuendo, or any other form of cruelty. When these things are raised to a high point they can become wit, but unlike the French and the English, we have not been much good at wit since the days of Benjamin Franklin.

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

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.

Let me be the first to admit that the naked truth about me is to the naked truth about Salvador Dali as an old ukulele in the attic is to a piano in a tree, and I mean a piano with breasts. Senor Dali has the jump on me from the beginning. He remembers and describes in detail what it was like in the womb. My own earliest memory is of accompanying my father to a polling booth in Columbus, Ohio, where he voted for William McKinley.

Reason is 6/7 of treason.