James Thurber

You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.

Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself in a great rear-end collision and Man will never know that what hit him from behind was Man.

I have always thought of a dog lover as a dog that was in love with another dog.

Though statisticians in our time have never kept the score man wants a great deal here below and Woman even more.

A lady of forty-seven who has been married twenty-seven years and has six children knows what love really is and once described it for me like this: 'Love is what you've been through with somebody.'

All men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from and to and why.

Her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house.

Humour is emotional chaos remembered in tranquillity.

It's a naive domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.

Let us not look back in anger nor forward in fear but around us in awareness.

I'm sixty-five but if there were fifteen months in every year I'd only be forty-eight.

I am 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were 15 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 12 years between the ages of 28 and 40.

Taking a single letter from the alphaber," he said, "should make life simpler.""I don't see why. Take the F from life and you have lie. It's adding a letter to simple that makes it simpler. Taking a letter from hoarder makes it harder.

...the Princess Saralinda thought she saw, as people often think they see, on clear and windless days, the distant shining shores of Ever After. Your guess is quite as good as mine (there are a lot of things that shine) but I have always thought she did, and I will always think so.

I admire the person who can write it right off. Mencken once said that a person who thinks clearly can write well. But I don't think clearly--too many thoughts bump into one another. Trains of thought run on a track of the Central Nervous System--the New York Central Nervous System, to make it worse.

I am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance - a sharp, vindictive glance.

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

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, and present-day traffic conditions are about equal to those of a one-legged man trying to get out of a labyrinth.