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History is replete with proofs, from Cato the Elder to Kennedy the Younger, that if you scratch a statesman you find an actor, but it is becoming harder and harder, in our time, to tell government from show business.

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
Tell
Proof
Proofs
Shows
Harder
Statesman
Government
Actor
Scratch
Find
Becoming
Statesmen
Time
Actors
Kennedy
Show
Scratches
Replete
History
Elders
Cato
Business
Younger
Elder

More quotes by James Thurber

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Don't count your boobies until they are hatched.
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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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.
James Thurber
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Muggs was always sorry, Mother said, when he bit someone, but we could never understand how she figured this out. He didn't act sorry.
James Thurber
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I myself have known some profoundly thoughtful dogs.
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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Laughter need not be cut out of anything, since it improves everything.
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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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.
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I drew pictures rapidly and with few lines, because I had to write most of the pieces, too, and couldn't monkey long with the drawings. The divine urge was no higher than that.
James Thurber
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American girls often marry someone they can't stand to spite someone they can.
James Thurber
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Dogs are obsessed with being happy.
James Thurber
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Last night I dreamed of a small consolation enjoyed only by the blind: Nobody knows the trouble I've not seen!
James Thurber
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Beautiful things don't ask for attention.
James Thurber
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I don't believe the writer should know too much where he's going. If he does, he runs into old man blueprint—old man propaganda.
James Thurber
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I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand.
James Thurber
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Youcanfooltoomanyofthepeopletoomuchofthetime. See Lincoln 510:35.
James Thurber
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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.
James Thurber
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The trouble with the lost generation is that it didn't get lost enough.
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