James Thurber (author) Quotes

″‘Not so fast! You’re driving too fast!’ said Mrs. Mitty. ‘What are you driving so fast for?‘”

“A woman’s scream rose above the bedlam and suddenly a lovely, dark-haired girl was in Walter Mitty’s arms.”

″‘With any known make of gun,’ he said evenly, ‘I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand.‘”

″‘Hmm?’ said Walter Mitty. He looked at his wife, in the seat beside him, with shocked astonishment. She seemed grossly unfamiliar, like a strange woman who had yelled at him in a crowd.”

“You’ll never live to wed his niece. You’ll only die to feed his geese.”

″‘I resemble only half the things I say I don’t,’ the Golux said. ‘The other half resemble me.‘”

″‘I had high hopes of being Evil when I was two, but in my youth I came upon a firefly burning in a spider’s web. I saved the victim’s life.’ ‘The firefly’s?’ said the minstrel. ‘The spider’s. The blinking arsonist had set the web on fire.‘”

“The Prince will break himself against a new and awful labor: a place too high to reach, a thing too far to find, a burden too heavy to lift.”

“The cold Duke was afraid of Now, for Now has warmth and urgency, and Then is dead and buried.”

“I place my faith in you, and where you lead, I follow.”

“Even the hands of his watch and the hands of all the thirteen clocks were frozen. They had all frozen at the same time, on a snowy night, seven years before, and after that it was always ten minutes to five in the castle.”

“Time lies frozen there. It’s always Then. It’s never Now.”

″...you are somewhat less than much, and only a little more than anything.”

“Once upon a time, in a gloomy castle on a lonely hill, where there were thirteen clocks that wouldn’t go, there lived a cold, aggressive Duke, and his niece, the Princess Saralinda. She was warm in every wind and weather, but he was always cold.”

“When I was young I told a tale of buried gold, and men from leagues around dug in the woods. I dug myself. But why? I thought the tale of treasure might be true.”