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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

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
Strange
Called
Happy
Wish
Carefree
Might
Troubled
Men
Compulsion
Dog
Involved

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Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counselling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, 'How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style?' and avoid 'How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?'
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Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.
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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.
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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.
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So much has already been written about everything that you can't find out anything about it.
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Comedy has ceased to be a challenge to the mental processes. It has become a therapy of relaxation, a kind of tranquilizing drug.
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Love is what you've been through with somebody.
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For one thing, she pronounced flowers 'flars' and I couldn't let it slide.
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In the pathways between office and home and home and the houses of settled people there are always, ready to snap at you, the little perils of routine living, but there is no escape in the unplanned tangent, the sudden turn.
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Laughter need not be cut out of anything, since it improves everything.
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I myself have known some profoundly thoughtful dogs.
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You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.
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He who hesitates is sometimes saved.
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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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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.
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This is the posture of fortunes slave: one foot in the gravy, one foot in the grave.
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I loathe the expression “What makes him tick.” It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solutions, 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.
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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.
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A husband should not insult his wife publicly, at parties. He should insult her in the privacy of the home.
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