“Remember laughter. You'll need it even in the blessed isles of Ever After.”
Source: The 13 Clocks
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“Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?”
Cartoon caption, The New Yorker (5 June 1937); "Word Dance--Part One", A Thurber Carnival (1960)
Cartoon captions
Source: Collecting Himself: James Thurber On Writing And Writers, Humor And Himself
“One (martini) is all right, two is too many, three is not enough.”
Quoted in Time Magazine (New York, 15 August 1960) from an an interview with Glenna Syse of the Chicago Sun-Times
Letters and interviews
“You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.”
"The Owl who was God", The New Yorker (29 April 1939); Fables for Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated (1940). Parody of "You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time."
From Fables for Our Time and Further Fables for Our Time
"My Senegalese Birds and Siamese Cats", Holiday Magazine; reprinted in Lanterns & Lances (1961).
From Lanterns and Lances
“Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead.”
"The Shrike and the Chipmunks", The New Yorker (18 February 1939); Fables for Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated (1940). Because it is derived from Benjamin Franklin's famous saying this is often misquoted as: Early to rise and early to bed makes a man healthy, wealthy, and dead.
From Fables for Our Time and Further Fables for Our Time
“There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.”
"The Fairly Intelligent Fly", The New Yorker (4 February 1939), a tale of a fly who avoided getting caught in an empty spider web, but then disregarding a warning by a bee, settled down among other flies he believed to be "dancing", and "became stuck to the flypaper with all the other flies."; Fables for Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated (1940); Quote Investigator notes that this statement was referred to as "Thurber’s Law", in 1,001 Logical Laws (1979) https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/07/21/safety/
Ref: en.wikiquote.org - James Thurber / Quotes / Fables for Our Time and Further Fables for Our Time
From Fables for Our Time and Further Fables for Our Time
"The Trouble with Man is Man", The New Yorker; reprinted in Lanterns & Lances (1961).
From Lanterns and Lances
“Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.”
"The Grizzly and the Gadgets", The New Yorker (date unknown); Further Fables for Our Time (1956); This statement is derived from one of Henry David Thoreau: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."
From Fables for Our Time and Further Fables for Our Time
“All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.”
"The Crow and the Scarecrow", The New Yorker (date unknown); Further Fables for Our Time (1956). This is derived from Oscar Wilde's statement "All men kill the thing they love..."
From Fables for Our Time and Further Fables for Our Time