Quotes by James Thurber

“Why can we remember the tiniest detail that has happened to us, and not remember how many times we have told it to the same person.”

All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.

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

You are all a lost generation, Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. We werent lost. We knew where we were, all right, but we wouldnt go home. Ours was the generation that stayed up all night.

You have made the moon, The Jester said. That is the moon.

Hundreds of hysterical persons must confuse these phenomena with messages from the beyond and take their glory to the bishop rather than the eye doctor.

Time is for dragonflies and angels. The former live too little and the latter live too long.

Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.

I make mistakes, but I am on the side of Good, the Golux said, by accident and happenchance. I had high hopes of being Evil when I was two, but in my youth I came upon a firefly burning in a spiders web. I saved the victims life.The fireflys ? said the minstrel.The spiders. The blinking arsonist had set the web on fire.

Ill never know the right answer for sex and marriage, sense and mirage.

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.

Art – the one achievement of man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised

Live life by the abcs...adventure, bravery and creativity.

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.

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

She has a memory of trees and fields and nothing more.

The jewels of sorrow last forever

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.

The average sendentary man of our time who is at all suggestible must emerge from this chapter believing that his chances of surviving a combination of instinct, complexes, reflexes, glands, sex, and present-day traffic conditions are about equal to those of a one-legged man trying to get out of a labyrinth.

On his misfit globe he has outlasted the mammoth and the pterodactyl, but he has never got the upper hand of bacteria and the insects.