Quotes by James Thurber

“All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.”

“If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons. ”

“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.”

“I'll never know the right answer for sex and marriage, sense and mirage.”

“You have made the moon," The Jester said. "That is the moon.”

“Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.”

“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 spid...”

“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.”

“Art the one achievement of man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised”

“Live life by the abc's...adventure, bravery and creativity.”

“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 ...”

“Time is for dragonflies and angels. The former live too little and the latter live too long.”

“She has a memory of trees and fields and nothing more.”

“In his grief over the loss of a dog, a little boy stands for the first time on tiptoe, peering into the rueful morrow of manhood. After this most inconsolable of sorrows there is nothing life can d...”

“Boys are beyond the range of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years.”

“The jewels of sorrow last forever”

“The dog has seldom been successful in pulling man up to its level of sagacity, but man has frequently dragged the dog down to his.”

“The average sendentary man of our time who is at all suggestible must emerge from this chapter believing that his chances of surviving a combination of instinct, complexes, reflexes, glands, sex, a...”

“On his misfit globe he has outlasted the mammoth and the pterodactyl, but he has never got the upper hand of bacteria and the insects.”

“...I would be the last person to say that madness is not a solution.”