James Thurber
Thurber was born in Columbus, Ohio to Charles L. Thurber and Mary Agnes (Mame) Fisher Thurber. Both of his parents greatly influenced his work. His father, a sporadically employed clerk and minor politician who dreamed of being a lawyer or an actor, is said to have been the inspiration for the small, timid protagonist typical of many of his stories. Thurber described his mother as a "born comedienne" and "one of the finest comic talents I think I have ever known." She was a practical joker, on one occasion pretending to be crippled and attending a faith healer revival, only to jump up and proclaim herself healed.
Thurber had two brothers, William and Robert. Once, while playing a game of William Tell, his brother William shot James in the eye with an arrow. Because of the lack of medical technology, Thurber lost his eye. This injury would later cause him to be almost entirely blind. During his childhood he was unable to participate in sports and activities because of his injury, and instead developed a creative imagination, which he shared in his writings.
From 1913 to 1918, Thurber attended The Ohio State University, where he was a member of the Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity. He never graduated from the University because his poor eyesight prevented him from taking a mandatory ROTC course. In 1995 he was posthumously awarded a degree.
From 1918 to 1920, at the close of World War I, Thurber worked as a code clerk for the Department of State, first in Washington, D.C. and then at the American Embassy in Paris, France. After this Thurber returned to Columbus, where he began his writing career as a reporter for the Columbus Dispatch from 1921 to 1924. During part of this time, he reviewed current books, films, and plays in a weekly column called "Credos and Curios," a title that later would be given to a posthumous collection of his work. Thurber also returned to Paris in this period, where he wrote for the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers.
In 1925, he moved to Greenwich Village in New York City, getting a job as a reporter for the New York Evening Post. He joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1927 as an editor with the help of his friend and fellow New Yorker contributor, E.B. White. His career as a cartoonist began in 1930 when White found some of Thurber's drawings in a trash can and submitted them for publication. Thurber would contribute both his writings and his drawings to The New Yorker until the 1950s.
Thurber was married twice. In 1922, Thurber married Althea Adams. The marriage was troubled and ended in divorce in May 1935. Adams gave Thurber his only child, his daughter Rosemary. Thurber remarried in June, 1935 to Helen Wismer. His second marriage lasted until he died in 1961, at the age of 66, due to complications from pneumonia, which followed upon a stroke suffered at his home. His last words, aside from the repeated word "God," were "God bless... God damn," according to Helen Thurber.
“Well, I'm disenchanted, too. We're all disenchanted.”
“It is hard for me to believe that Miss Groby ever saw any work of literature from far enough away to know what it meant. She was forever climbing up the margins of books and crawling between their lines for the little gold of phrase, making marks with a pencil. As Palamides hunted the Questing Beast, she hunted the Figure of Speech. She hunted it through the clangorous halls of Shakespeare and through the green forests of Scott.”
“But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?”
“Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.”
“Her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house.”
“Ne regardez pas en arrière avec colère,ni devant avec crainte,mais autour de vous avec conscience.”
“You have made the moon," The Jester said. "That is the moon.”
“ta-pocketa, ta-pocketa”
“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.”
“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.”
“I don't remember any blue poodles.”
“A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption.A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn't make sense.”
“you might as well fall on your face as lean over too far backwards”
“The noblest study of mankind is Man, says Man.”
“Sophistication might be described as the ability to cope gracefully with a situation involving the presence of a formidable menace to one's poise and prestige...”
“It is all but impossible to sit quietly by when someone is throwing salad plates.”
“Mutual suspicions of mental inadequacy are common during the first year of any marriage.”
“At forty my faculties may have closed up like flowers at evening, leaving me unable to write my memoirs with a fitting and discreet inaccuracy, or, having written them, unable to carry them to the publisher.”
“Hens embarrass me; owls disturb me; if I am with an eagle I always pretend that I am not with an eagle; and so on down to swallows at twilight who scare the hell out of me. But pigeons have absolutely no effect on me.”
“For one thing, she pronounced flowers 'flars' and I couldn't let it slide.”
“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.”
“Authors of light pieces have, nobody knows why, a genius for getting into minor difficulties: they walk into the wrong apartments, they drink furniture polish for stomach bitters, they drive their cars into the prize tulip beds of haughty neighbors, they playfully slap gangsters, mistaking them for old school friends.”
“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.”
“Salvador [Dali] was brought up in Spain, a country colored by the legends of Hannibal, El Greco, and Cervantes. I was brought up in Ohio, a region steeped in the tradition of Coxey's Army, the Anti-Saloon League, and William Howard Taft.”
“She wasn't much to look at but she was something to think about.”
“If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons. ”
“I am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance - a sharp, vindictive glance. ”
“Let us not look back to the past with anger, nor towards the future with fear, but look around with awareness.”
“I can feel a thing I cannot touch and touch a thing I cannot feel. The first is sad and sorry, the second is your heart.”
“He who hesitates is sometimes saved.”
“Two is company, four is a party, three is a crowd. One is a wanderer.”
“What would you do without me? Say 'nothing.'""Nothing," said the Prince."Good. Then you're helpless and I'll help you.”
“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.”
“Time is for dragonflies and angels. The former live too little and the latter live too long.”
“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.”
“Have you brought the moon to me?" she asked. "Not yet," said the Court Jester, "but I will get it for you right away. How big do you think it is?" "It is just a little smaller than my thumbnail," she said, "for when I hold my thumbnail up at the moon, it just covers it." "And how far away is it? asked the Court Jester. "It is not as high as the big tree outside my window," said the Princess, "for sometimes it gets caught in the top branches." It will be very easy to get the moon for you," said the Court Jester. "I will climb the tree tonight when it gets caught in the top branches and bring it to you." The he thought of something else. "What is the moon make of, Princess?" he asked. "Oh," she said, "it's made of gold, of course, silly.”
“Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street.”
“All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.”
“I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere.”
“Geep,' whuppled the parrot.”
“Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.”
“My mother, for instance, thought-or rather, knew-that it was dangerous to drive an automobile without gasoline: it fried the valves, or something. 'Now don't you dare drive all over town without gasoline!' she would say to us when we started off" (31).”
“Man has gone long enough, or even too long, without being man enough to face the simple truth that the trouble with man is man.”
“I do not have a psychiatrist and I do not want one, for the simple reason that if he listened to me long enough, he might become disturbed.”
“We all have faults, mine is being wicked.”
“I love the idea of there being two sexes, don't you?”
“Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around us in awareness.”
“Ride close together. Remember laughter. You'll need it even in the blessed isles of Ever After.”
“There was a mist of moss to ride through and a storm of glass.”
“Art – the one achievement of man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised”