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James Thurber"There are two kinds of light - the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures." - James Thurber

James Grover Thurber (1894–1961) was an American humorist and cartoonist best known for his cartoons and short stories in The New Yorker. Blinded in one eye as a child (by an arrow while playing a game of William Tell), he went totally blind in his mid 40s but continued to write.

He portrayed the preposterousness and frustrations of modern life in such collections as The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities (1931), The Seal in the Bedroom and Other Predicaments (1932), and Fables For Our Time (1940). He also wrote memorable stories such as The Secret Life of Walter Mitty; children's books, including The Thirteen Clocks (1950), and co-wrote with Elliot Nugent the Broadway comedy, The Male Animal (1940).

More quotes from James Thurber

A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn't make sense.

All men kill the thing they hate ... unless, of course, it kills them first.

Discussion in America means dissent.

Don't get it right, just get it written.

Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead.

He who hesitates is sometimes saved.

I'm 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were fifteen 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 twelve years between the ages of 28 and 40.

It is better to have loafed and lost, than never to have loafed at all.

Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.

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.

Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself in a great rear end collision.

Progress was all right. Only it went on too long.

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.

There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception.

With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.

Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.

You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.

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