Quote collection
169 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The whole of Paris is a vast university of Art, Literature and Music... it is worth anyone's while to dally here for years. Paris is a seminar, a post-graduate course in everything."
"In the pathways between office and home and home and the houses of settled people there are always, ready to snap at you, the little perils of routine living, but there is no escape in the unplanned tangent, the sudden turn."
"A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption."
"I was seized by the stern hand of Compulsion, that dark, unreasonable Urge that impels women to clean house in the middle of the night."
"A peril of the night road is that flecks of dust and streaks of bug blood on the windshield look to me like old admirals in uniform, or crippled apple women, or the front edge of barges, and I whirl out of their way, thus going into ditches and fields and up on front lawns, endangering the life of authentic admirals and apple women who may be out on the roads for a breath of air before retiring."
"He had as much fun in the water as any person I have known. You didn't have to throw a stick in the water to get him to go in. Of course, he would bring back a stick to you if you did throw one in. He would even have brought back a piano if you had thrown one in."
"Muggs was always sorry, Mother said, when he bit someone, but we could never understand how she figured this out. He didn't act sorry."
"Looks can be deceiving; it's eating that's believing."
"It had only one fault. It was kind of lousy."
"Women deserve to have more than 12 years between 28 and 40."
"When man gives up on reforming and inspiring society he also gives up his freedom."
"You are all a lost generation," Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. We weren't lost. We knew where we were, all right, but we wouldn't go home. Ours was the generation that stayed up all night."
"A wet dog is lovingest."
"The paths of glory at least lead to the Grave, but the paths of duty may not get you Anywhere."
"If you are a police dog, where's your badge?"
"It was Lisa, aged five, whose mother asked her to thank my wife for the peas we had sent them from our garden. 'I thought the peas were awful, I wish you and Mrs. Thurber were dead, and I hate trees,' said Lisa."
"He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes."
"I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age."
"I drew pictures rapidly and with few lines, because I had to write most of the pieces, too, and couldn't monkey long with the drawings. The divine urge was no higher than that."
"We all have faults, and mine is being wicked."