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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.

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
Worst
Playwright
Since
Elephants
Snowstorm
Everybody
Count
Snowstorms
Eye
Theatre
Hannibal
Lost
Tried
Alps
Trying
Case
Nineteen
Would
Theater
Crossing
Cases
Crossings

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The unicorn is a mythical beast.
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But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?
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It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
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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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The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.
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There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.
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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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He who hesitates is sometimes saved.
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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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Humor and pathos, tears and laughter are, in the highest expression of human character and achievement, inseparable.
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He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes.
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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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Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.
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Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.
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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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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.
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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.
James Thurber
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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.
James Thurber
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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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I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand.
James Thurber