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Humourists lead... an existence of jumpiness and apprehension. They sit on the edge of the chair of Literature. In the house of Life they have the feeling that they have never taken off their overcoats.

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
Taken
Humour
House
Chairs
Feelings
Edge
Never
Edges
Life
Lead
Existence
Overcoat
Feeling
Apprehension
Literature
Chair

More quotes by James Thurber

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Remember laughter. You'll need it even in the blessed isles of Ever After.
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Time is for dragonflies and angels. The former live too little and the latter live too long.
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Dogs are obsessed with being happy.
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American girls often marry someone they can't stand to spite someone they can.
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The unicorn is a mythical beast.
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I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age.
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God bless... God damn.
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If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
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Men are more interesting than women, but women ae more fascinating.
James Thurber
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My opposition to Interviews lies in the fact that offhand answers have little value or grace of expression, and that such oral give and take helps to perpetuate the decline of the English language.
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Somebody has said that woman's place is in the wrong. That's fine. What the wrong needs is a woman's presence and a woman's touch. She is far better equipped than men to set it right.
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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.
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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
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Hundreds of hysterical persons must confuse these phenomena with messages from the beyond and take their glory to the bishop rather than the eye doctor.
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The sanity of the average banquet speaker lasts about two and a half months at the end of that time he begins to mutter to himself, and calls out in his sleep.
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There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.
James Thurber
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The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.
James Thurber
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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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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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Unless artists can remember what it was to be a little boy, they are only half complete as artist and as man.
James Thurber