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

In the nature of things, a person engaged in the flimsy business of expressing himself on paper is dependent on the large general privilege of being heard. Any intimation that this privilege may be revoked throws a writer into panic.

There's no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another.

When my wife's Aunt Caroline was in her nineties, she lived with us, and she once remarked: 'Remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen.' I cherish the remembrance of the beauty I have seen. I cherish the grave, compulsive word.

The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.

Writing is one way to go about thinking, and the practice and habit of writing not only drain the mind but supply it, too.

Most people think of peace as a state of Nothing Bad Happening, or Nothing Much Happening. Yet if peace is to overtake us and make us the gift of serenity and well-being, it will have to be the state of Something Good Happening.