I would really rather feel bad in Maine than feel good anywhere else

Shocking writing is like murder: the questions the jury must decide are the questions of motive and intent.

The complaint about modern steel furniture, modern glass houses, modern red bars and modern streamlined trains and cars is that all these objets modernize, while adequate and amusing in themselves, tend to make the people who use them look dated. It is an honest criticism. The human race has done nothing much about changing its own appearance to conform to the form and texture of its appurtenances.

Children almost always hang onto things tighter than their parents think they will.

Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes.

A schoolchild should be taught grammar—for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy.

You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.