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All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.James Thurber
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If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.James Thurber
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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.James Thurber
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You have made the moon, " The Jester said. "That is the moon.James Thurber
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Hundreds of hysterical persons must confuse these phenomena with messages from the beyond and take their glory to the bishop rather than the eye doctor.James Thurber
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Time is for dragonflies and angels. The former live too little and the latter live too long.James Thurber
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Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.James Thurber
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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.James Thurber
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I'll never know the right answer for sex and marriage, sense and mirage.James Thurber
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The appreciative smile, the chuckle, the soundless mirth, so important to the success of comedy, cannot be understood unless one sits among the audience and feels the warmth created by the quality of laughter that the audience takes home with it.James Thurber
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Art — the one achievement of man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advisedJames Thurber
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Live life by the abc's...adventure, bravery and creativity.James Thurber
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In his grief over the loss of a dog, a little boy stands for the first time on tiptoe, peering into the rueful morrow of manhood. After this most inconsolable of sorrows there is nothing life can do to him that he will not be able somehow to bear.James Thurber
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Boys are beyond the range of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years.James Thurber
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She has a memory of trees and fields and nothing more.James Thurber
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The jewels of sorrow last foreverJames Thurber
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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.James Thurber
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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.James Thurber
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On his misfit globe he has outlasted the mammoth and the pterodactyl, but he has never got the upper hand of bacteria and the insects.James Thurber
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...I would be the last person to say that madness is not a solution.James Thurber
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I am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance - a sharp, vindictive glance.James Thurber
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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.James Thurber
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...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.James Thurber
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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.James Thurber
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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.James Thurber
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I'm sixty-five but if there were fifteen months in every year I'd only be forty-eight.James Thurber
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Let us not look back in anger nor forward in fear but around us in awareness.James Thurber
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It's a naive domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.James Thurber
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Humour is emotional chaos remembered in tranquillity.James Thurber
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Her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house.James Thurber
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All men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from and to and why.James Thurber
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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.'James Thurber
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Though statisticians in our time have never kept the score man wants a great deal here below and Woman even more.James Thurber
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I have always thought of a dog lover as a dog that was in love with another dog.James Thurber
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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.James Thurber
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You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.James Thurber
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The difference between our decadence and the Russians' is that while theirs is brutal ours is apathetic.James Thurber
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We all have flaws and mine is being wicked.James Thurber
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The wit makes fun of other persons the satirist makes fun of the world the humorist makes fun of himself.James Thurber
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Woman's place is in the wrong.James Thurber
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The nation that complacently and fearfully allows its artists and writers to become suspected rather than respected is no longer regarded as a nation possessed with humor or depth.James Thurber
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Humor is a serious thing. I like to think of it as one of our greatest earliest natural resources, which must be preserved at all cost.James Thurber
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Love is what you've been through with somebody.James Thurber
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Comedy has to be done en clair. You can't blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediately clear.James Thurber
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The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people - that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature.James Thurber
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The most dangerous food is wedding cake.James Thurber
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Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.James Thurber
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I hate women because they always know where things are.James Thurber
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I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere.James Thurber
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The dog has got more fun out of Man than Man has got out of the dog, for the clearly demonstrable reason that Man is the more laughable of the two animals.James Thurber
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Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.James Thurber
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But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?James Thurber
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Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?James Thurber
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Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?James Thurber
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Progress was all right. Only it went on too long.James Thurber
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It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.James Thurber
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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.James Thurber