If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
James ThurberRead
Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?
Interpretation
This quote highlights the absurdity of a situation where one party questions the other for their involvement.
James Thurber's quote exemplifies a humorous exchange where someone questions another's response to a misdialed phone call. It implies that if the call was indeed a mistake, the recipient's action of answering suggests a complicity in the situation, reflecting on human interactions and the often illogical nature of communication.
In practice
This quote can be used in a comedic speech about miscommunication.
If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
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.
The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal.
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.
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.
Unless artists can remember what it was to be a little boy, they are only half complete as artist and as man.
There are certain sorts of jokes which have only to do with the substitution of the unexpected word in a familiar context. If you translated something into French and then had it translated back into English by somebody who didn't know the original, you'd lose what was funny.
The invitation to Miss Myra St. Claire's bobbing party spent the morning in his coat pocket, where it had an intense physical affair with a dusty piece of peanut brittle.
I'm only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler; I don't like beer.
Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
Some debts are fun when you are acquiring them, but none are fun when you set about retiring them.
I have no intention of uttering my last words on the stage. Room service and a couple of depraved young women will do me quite nicely for an exit.
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