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

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You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
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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.
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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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Time is for dragonflies and angels. The former live too little and the latter live too long.
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I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.
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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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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.
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Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.
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We all have faults, and mine is being wicked.
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Reason is 6/7 of treason.
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Sophistication might be described as the ability to cope gracefully with a situation involving the presence of a formidable menace to one's poise and prestige (such as the butler, or the man under the bed - but never the husband).
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I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere.
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Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.
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Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?
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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.
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The unicorn is a mythical beast.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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