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

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

More quotes by James Thurber

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Remember laughter. You'll need it even in the blessed isles of Ever After.
James Thurber
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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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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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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
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Love is what you've been through with somebody.
James Thurber
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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?
James Thurber
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A husband should not insult his wife publicly, at parties. He should insult her in the privacy of the home.
James Thurber
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I'm sixty-five and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics, but if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be forty-eight.
James Thurber
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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.
James Thurber
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Don't count your boobies until they are hatched.
James Thurber
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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.
James Thurber
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Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.
James Thurber
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The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.
James Thurber
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Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?
James Thurber
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I love the idea of there being two sexes, don't you?
James Thurber
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Beautiful things don't ask for attention.
James Thurber
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For one thing, she pronounced flowers 'flars' and I couldn't let it slide.
James Thurber
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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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Man is troubled by what might be called the Dog Wish, a strange and involved compulsion to be as happy and carefree as a dog
James Thurber
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The unicorn is a mythical beast.
James Thurber