Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by James Thurber

Image
Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.
James Thurber
Image
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.
James Thurber
Image
I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand.
James Thurber
Image
The Old Man ain’t afraid of hell
James Thurber
Image
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?'
James Thurber
Image
He who hesitates is sometimes saved.
James Thurber
Image
The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.
James Thurber
Image
You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
James Thurber
Image
Men are more interesting than women, but women ae more fascinating.
James Thurber
Image
Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?
James Thurber
Image
I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere.
James Thurber
Image
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.
James Thurber
Image
The paths of glory at least lead to the Grave, but the paths of duty may not get you Anywhere.
James Thurber
Image
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
Image
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.
James Thurber
Image
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
Image
There are two kinds of light - the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.
James Thurber
Image
There is something about a poet which leads us to believe that he died, in many cases, as long as 20 years before his birth.
James Thurber
Image
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.
James Thurber
Image
Comedy has ceased to be a challenge to the mental processes. It has become a therapy of relaxation, a kind of tranquilizing drug.
James Thurber