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

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American girls often marry someone they can't stand to spite someone they can.
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Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.
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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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Humor and pathos, tears and laughter are, in the highest expression of human character and achievement, inseparable.
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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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There are two kinds of light - the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.
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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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I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand.
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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 was seized by the stern hand of Compulsion, that dark, unreasonable Urge that impels women to clean house in the middle of the night.
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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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Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.
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I make mistakes, but I am on the side of Good, the Golux said, by accident and happenchance. I had high hopes of being Evil when I was two, but in my youth I came upon a firefly burning in a spider's web. I saved the victim's life. The firefly's ? said the minstrel. The spider's. The blinking arsonist had set the web on fire.
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Time is for dragonflies and angels. The former live too little and the latter live too long.
James Thurber
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There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception.
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There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.
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The paths of glory at least lead to the Grave, but the paths of duty may not get you Anywhere.
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I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age.
James Thurber
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The most dangerous food is wedding cake.
James Thurber