Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?
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.
If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
There is something about a poet which leads us to believe that he died, in many cases, as long as 20 years before his birth.
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
Boys are beyond the range of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years.
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.
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.
Comedy has ceased to be a challenge to the mental processes. It has become a therapy of relaxation, a kind of tranquilizing drug.
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.
When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.
With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.
Muggs was always sorry, Mother said, when he bit someone, but we could never understand how she figured this out. He didn't act sorry.
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.
I was seized by the stern hand of Compulsion, that dark, unreasonable Urge that impels women to clean house in the middle of the night.
Most of the faint intimations of immortality of which we are occasionally aware would seem to arise out of Art or the materials of Art.
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.
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.
Surely no other American institution is so bound around and tightened up by rules, strictures, adages, and superstitions as the Broadway theatre.
I hate women because they have brought into the currency of our language such expressions as "all righty" and "yes indeedy" and hundreds of others.
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.
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.
The dog has got more fun out of Man than Man has got out of the dog, for the clearly demonstrable reason that Man is the more laughable of the two animals
The dog has got more fun out of Man than Man has got out of the dog, for the clearly demonstrable reason that Man is the more laughable of the two animals.
The sanity of the average banquet speaker lasts about two and a half months; at the end of that time he begins to mutter to himself, and calls out in his sleep.
My drawings have been described as pre-internationalist, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point.
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.
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.
Until a man can quit talking loudly to himself in order to shout down the memories of blunderings and gropings, he is in no shape for the painstaking examination of distress.
Speed is scarcely the noblest virtue of graphic composition, but it has its curious rewards. There is a sense of getting somewhere fast, which satisfies a native American urge.
I drew pictures rapidly and with few lines, because I had to write most of the pieces, too, and couldn't monkey long with the drawings. The divine urge was no higher than that.
Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other
It takes that je ne sais quoi which we call sophistication for a woman to be magnificent in a drawing-room when her faculties have departed but she herself has not yet gone home.
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.
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.
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.
The whole of Paris is a vast university of Art, Literature and Music... it is worth anyone's while to dally here for years. Paris is a seminar, a post-graduate course in everything.
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.
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.
You are all a lost generation," Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. We weren't lost. We knew where we were, all right, but we wouldn't go home. Ours was the generation that stayed up all night.
My opposition to Interviews lies in the fact that offhand answers have little value or grace of expression, and that such oral give and take helps to perpetuate the decline of the English language.
I used to wake up at 4 A.M. and start sneezing, sometimes for five hours. I tried to find out what sort of allergy I had but finally came to the conclusion that it must be an allergy to consciousness.
Humourists lead... an existence of jumpiness and apprehension. They sit on the edge of the chair of Literature. In the house of Life they have the feeling that they have never taken off their overcoats.
I write humor the way a surgeon operates, because it is a livelihood, because I have a great urge to do it, because many interesting challenges are set up, and because I have the hope it may do some good.
At forty my faculties may have closed up like flowers at evening, leaving me unable to write my memoirs with a fitting and discreet inaccuracy, or, having written them, unable to carry them to the publisher.
If a playwright tried to see eye to eye with everybody, he would get the worst case of strabismus since Hannibal lost an eye trying to count his nineteen elephants during a snowstorm while crossing the Alps.
It was Lisa, aged five, whose mother asked her to thank my wife for the peas we had sent them from our garden. 'I thought the peas were awful, I wish you and Mrs. Thurber were dead, and I hate trees,' said Lisa.
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.
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.