My mother introduced me to Thurber's writings, and I couldn't possibly put up a web page in her honor without some great Thurber quotes and links. It was for my high school speech class, that she helped me pick one of Thurber's essays to read. Oh, do I gleefully remember savoring the delivery of that punch line.
I actually don't recall Mom as having had a wry sense of humor when I was growing up, but all our Thurber favorites were full of that kind of twist, ranging from "The Unicorn in the Garden," to the story in The Thurber Carnival, called "The Princess and the Tin Box," which ended with a moral about choosing a hunk of aluminum silicate over something more valuable.
Many classic Thurber quotes are sprinkled all around the Web. One such beautiful quip, a caption from a cartoon that appeared in The New Yorker in 1937, is:
"Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?"
---James Thurber
The following timeless classic is also available on many, many sites:
"A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn't make sense."
---James Thurber
There are many, many sites with Thurber quotes. All you have to do is perform a web search for
James-Thurber quotes OR quotations
and you will turn up a bunch.
If you don't have time to do a search, one such excellent site with many James Thurber links and a lot of information about Thurber is http://www.bigeye.com/thurber.htm.
If you're looking for a good clean laugh with a twist, Thurber is a great author to turn to.
