James Thurber
James Thurber
James Grover Thurberwas an American cartoonist, author, journalist, playwright, and celebrated wit. Thurber was best known for his cartoons and short stories, published mainly in The New Yorker magazine and collected in his numerous books. One of the most popular humorists of his time, Thurber celebrated the comic frustrations and eccentricities of ordinary people. In collaboration with his college friend Elliott Nugent, he wrote the Broadway comedy The Male Animal, later adapted into a film, which starred Henry Fonda and...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCartoonist
Date of Birth8 December 1894
CityColumbus, OH
CountryUnited States of America
The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.
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.
In an extensive reading of recent books by psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, and inspirationalists, I have discovered that they all suffer from one or more of these expression-complexes: italicizing, capitalizing, exclamation-pointing, multiple-interrogating, and itemizing. These are all forms of what the psychos themselves would call, if they faced their condition frankly, Rhetorical-Over-Compensation.
The most dangerous food is wedding cake.
Reason is 6/7 of treason.
But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?
There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.
You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
I never quite know when I'm not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, "Dammit, Thurber, stop writing." She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph.
Beautiful things don't ask for attention.
I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere.
Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.
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.
This is the posture of fortunes slave: one foot in the gravy, one foot in the grave.