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James Thurber Quotes and Quotations
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. It's a naive domestic burgundy without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption. Humour is emotional chaos remembered in tranquillity. Her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house. All men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why. 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.' Though statisticians in our time have never kept the score man wants a great deal here below and Woman even more. 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. The difference between our decadence and the Russians' is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic. We all have flaws, and mine is being wicked. The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself. Woman's place is in the wrong. You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward. Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around us in awareness. I have always thought of a dog lover as a dog that was in love with another dog. I'm sixty-five, but if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be forty-eight. |