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James Thurber Quotes

Total quotes: 6
“Beautiful things don’t ask for attention.”
— James Thurber, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Tagged: Beautiful Things, Beautiful, Attention, Inspirational
“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, The Parents' Guide to Boys
Tagged: boys, Confusion, Understanding
“One martini is just right, two is too many, three is not enough.”
— James Thurber, One Man's Paradise
Tagged: Drinking, martini, wasted, Drunk
“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. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, ‘Is he sick?’ ‘No,’ my wife says, ‘he’s writing something.’ I have to do it that way on account of my eyes. I still write occasionally—in the proper sense of the word—using black crayon on yellow paper and getting perhaps twenty words to the page. My usual method, though, is to spend the mornings turning over the text in my mind. Then in the afternoon, between two and five, I call in a secretary and dictate to her. I can do about two thousand words. It took me about ten years to learn.”
— James Thurber, The Art of Fiction No. 10
Tagged: Writing Routines
“I love her, always have, always will. I loved her when I saw her. There were the ‘rapid heart-beats’ and all. I sat and stared at her as I never sat and stared at anyone. I didn’t give one damn at first about talking. I didn’t know what I said or what she said…

I don’t know what it is, or was to begin with, but there was the same sensation after eleven years that I had when, as a kid, I told her good-bye, pulled my cap to pieces, and felt an ache and an urge in my heart too old for my years, but too eternal and atavistically strong ever to be classed as ‘puppy love’ or any other thing. She was the One Girl. And I felt it again, that unexplainable thing. When sitting opposite her, after dinner in her home, we were for the first time solidly alone. I wanted her. That’s all.”
— James Thurber, The Thurber Letters: The Wit, Wisdom, and Surprising Life of James Thurber
Tagged: Stunning Love Letters
“A woman is often a wonderful thing. And you are. But in you, as in all of them, is the indifference of Carmen, the joy in cruelty of Cleopatra, the tyrannical marble-heartedness of Katherine De Medici, and the cold glitter of all the passionless despots of men’s warm souls since sex first originated — since Eve broke the heart of humanity forever and laughed with sadistic joy at Adam sweating blood on the rack she made for him. All those things are most in you now. They are always predominant in a woman who is passionately loved but who loves not at all herself. Women like that are greatly interested in the lover’s sufferings, but to her they are a spectacle, a Roman holiday — a pageant of exciting emotions, nothing else.”
— James Thurber, The Thurber Letters: The Wit, Wisdom, and Surprising Life of James Thurber
Tagged: Woman, Sadistic, Unrequited, Suffering, Games, Love, Heartache, Indifference
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