Extreme cold when it first arrives seems to generate cheerfulness and sociability. For a few hours all life’s dubious problems are dropped in favor of the clear and congenial task of keeping alive.
It is Sunday, mid-morning-Sunday in the living room, Sunday in the kitchen, Sunday in the woodshed, Sunday down the road in the village: I hear the bells, calling me to share God’s grace.
I have just been refining the room in which I sit, yet I sometimes doubt that a writer should refine or improve his workroom by so much as a dictionary: one thing leads to another and the first thing you know he has a stuffed chair and is fast asleep in it.
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.
Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes.
In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty.
Life’s accumulation is more discouraging than life itself, when stirred up.
Early summer days are a jubilee time for birds. In the fields, around the house, in the barn, in the woods, in the swamp – everywhere love and songs and nests and eggs.
A right is a responsibility in reverse.
Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.
The H-bomb rather favors small nations that doesn’t as yet possess it; they feel slightly more free to jostle other nations, having discovered that a country can stick its tongue out quite far these days without provoking war, so horrible are war’s consequences.
Much of our adult morality, in books and out of them, has a stuffiness unworthy of childhood. Our grown-up conclusions often rest on perilously soft bottom.
Liberty is never out of bounds or off limits; it spreads wherever it can capture the imagination of men.
I seldom went to bed before two or three o’clock in the morning, on the theory that if anything of interest were to happen to a young man it would almost certainly happen late at night.
There is another sort of day which needs celebrating in song – the day of days when spring at last holds up her face to be kissed, deliberate and unabashed. On that day no wind blows either in the hills or in the mind.
Sometimes a writer, like an acrobat, must try a trick that is too much for him.
The young writer should learn to spot them: words that at first glance seem freighted with delicious meaning, but that soon burst in the air, leaving nothing but a memory of bright sound.
A single overstatement, wherever or however it occurs, diminishes the whole, and a carefree superlative has the power to destroy, for the reader, the object of the writer’s enthusiasm.
Too many things on my mind, said Wilbur. Well, said the goose, that’s not my trouble. I have nothing at all on my mind, but I’ve too many things under my behind.
The rat had no morals, no conscience, no scruples, no consideration, no decency, no milk of rodent kindness, no compunctions, no higher feeling, no friendliness, no anything.