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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.

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
Hands
Clean
Women
Humor
Impels
Hand
Seized
Middle
Stern
Dark
Unreasonable
Funny
Compulsion
House
Urge
Night
Urges

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The most dangerous food is wedding cake.
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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.
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There are two kinds of light - the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.
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I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand.
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Remember laughter. You'll need it even in the blessed isles of Ever After.
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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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So much has already been written about everything that you can't find out anything about it.
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He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes.
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Looks can be deceiving it's eating that's believing.
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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.
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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 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.
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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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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.
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God bless... God damn.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.
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