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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.

James Thurber

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James Thurber
Age: 66 †
Born: 1894
Born: December 18
Died: 1961
Died: November 2
Autobiographer
Cartoonist
Drawer
Humorist
Journalist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Columbus
Ohio
James Grover Thurber
Getting
Native
American
Curious
Satisfies
Sense
Rewards
Noblest
Speed
Scarcely
Fast
Graphic
Somewhere
Urge
Comedy
Urges
Virtue
Composition

More quotes by James Thurber

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Beautiful things don't ask for attention.
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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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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.
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He who hesitates is sometimes saved.
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We all have faults, and mine is being wicked.
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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.
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I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age.
James Thurber
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Unless artists can remember what it was to be a little boy, they are only half complete as artist and as man.
James Thurber
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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 spider's web. I saved the victim's life. The firefly's ? said the minstrel. The spider's. The blinking arsonist had set the web on fire.
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Don't count your boobies until they are hatched.
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Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?
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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.
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I love the idea of there being two sexes, don't you?
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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.
James Thurber
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Last night I dreamed of a small consolation enjoyed only by the blind: Nobody knows the trouble I've not seen!
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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.
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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.
James Thurber
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Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.
James Thurber
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Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.
James Thurber
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We all know that the theater and every play that comes to Broadway have within themselves, like the human being, the seed of self-destruction and the certainty of death. The thing is to see how long the theater, the play, and the human being can last in spite of themselves.
James Thurber