"If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons."
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Quote collection
James Thurber quotes (page 2 of 9)
169 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception."
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"One martini is all right. Two are too many, and three are not enough."
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"It's a naive domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption."
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"I have lived in the East for nearly thirty years now, but many of my books prove that I am never very far away from Ohio in my thoughts, and that the clocks that strike in my dreams are often the clocks of Columbus."
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"A burden in the bush is worth two on your hands."
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"Love is what you've been through with somebody."
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"Humor does not include sarcasm, invalid irony, sardonicism, innuendo, or any other form of cruelty. When these things are raised to a high point they can become wit, but unlike the French and the English, we have not been much good at wit since the days of Benjamin Franklin."
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"The act of writing is either something the writer dreads or actually likes, and I actually like it. Even re-writing's fun. You're getting somewhere, whether it seems to move or not."
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"You can fool too many of the people too much of the time."
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"The things we laugh at are awful while they are going on, but get funny when we look back. And other people laugh because they've been through it too. The closest thing to humor is tragedy."
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"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."
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"Beautiful things don't ask for attention."
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"The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess."
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"Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?"
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"Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness."
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"I myself have known some profoundly thoughtful dogs."
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"Every man is occasionally visited by the suspicion that the planet on which he is riding is not really going anywhere; that the Force which controls its measured eccentricities hasn't got anything special in mind. If he broods on this somber theme long enough he gets the doleful idea that the laughing children on a merry-go-round or the thin, fine hands of a lady's watch are revolving more purposely than he is."
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"Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?"
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"A lady of 47 who has been married 27 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'."
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