Explore Quotes by James Thurber

Beautiful things don't ask for attention.

Salvador [Dali] was brought up in Spain, a country colored by the legends of Hannibal, El Greco, and Cervantes. I was brought up in Ohio, a region steeped in the tradition of Coxey's Army, the Anti-Saloon League, and William Howard Taft.

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.

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

What would you do without me? Say 'nothing.'" "Nothing," said the Prince. "Good. Then you're helpless and I'll help you.

I can feel a thing I cannot touch and touch a thing I cannot feel. The first is sad and sorry, the second is your heart.

Mutual suspicions of mental inadequacy are common during the first year of any marriage.

Authors of light pieces have, nobody knows why, a genius for getting into minor difficulties: they walk into the wrong apartments, they drink furniture polish for stomach bitters, they drive their cars into the prize tulip beds of haughty neighbors, they playfully slap gangsters, mistaking them for old school friends.

It was Lisa, aged five, whose mother asked her to thank my wife for the peas we had sent them from our garden. 'I thought the peas were awful, I wish you and Mrs. Thurber were dead, and I hate trees,' said Lisa.

For one thing, she pronounced flowers 'flars' and I couldn't let it slide.

She wasn't much to look at but she was something to think about.

Two is company, four is a party, three is a crowd. One is a wanderer.

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.

Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street.

I do not have a psychiatrist and I do not want one, for the simple reason that if he listened to me long enough, he might become disturbed.

Remember laughter. You'll need it even in the blessed isles of Ever After.

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

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.

It had only one fault. It was kind of lousy.

Let me be the first to admit that the naked truth about me is to the naked truth about Salvador Dali as an old ukulele in the attic is to a piano in a tree, and I mean a piano with breasts. Senor Dali has the jump on me from the beginning. He remembers and describes in detail what it was like in the womb. My own earliest memory is of accompanying my father to a polling booth in Columbus, Ohio, where he voted for William McKinley.