James Grover Thurber

United States humorist and cartoonist who published collections of essays and stories (1894-1961)

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It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all the answers.
Love is what you've been through with somebody.
You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.
All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.
All men should strive to learn before they die What they are running from, and to, and why.
Boys are beyond the range of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years.
But those rare souls whose spirit gets magically into the hearts of men, leave behind them something more real and warmly personal than bodily presence, an ineffable and eternal thing. It is everlasting life touching us as something more than a vague, recondite concept. The sound of a great name dies like an echo the splendor of fame fades into nothing but the grace of a fine spirit pervades the places through which it has passed, like the haunting loveliness of mignonette.
I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere.
I'm 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be 48. That's the trouble with us. We number everything. Take women, for example. I think they deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of 28 and 40.
If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.
One has but to observe a community of beavers at work in a stream to understand the loss in his sagacity, balance, cooperation, competence, and purpose which Man has suffered since he rose up on his hind legs.... He began to chatter and he developed Reason, Thought, and Imagination, qualities which would get the smartest group of rabbits or orioles in the world into inextricable trouble overnight.
Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other.
The difference between our decadence and the Russians' is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.
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.
Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone
You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.

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