I was walking along Park Avenue and passed a blind man with a cup. I put a quarter in it, as I always do, and walked on and then words went through my head--"dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon"--and then I looked at my watch and it was exactly noon and I couldn't help it; right in the middle of the street I began to cry.
In an unpublished letter, quoted in The Joy of Writing.
Don't forget, and don't let your reader forget, that the small world in which you have held him for the last hour or two hasn't ended. Be aware, and make him aware, that tomorrow all of its remaining inhabitants will pick up the broken fragments of their lives, and carry on.
It is in the places where history was made that history is most sorely felt.
The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.
The cop named Joe took it and turned it over. "What is it?" he asked me. "It's an old zither our guinea pig used to sleep on," I said. It was true that a guinea pig we once had would never sleep anywhere except on the zither, but I should never have said so. Joe and the other cop looked at me a long time. They put the zither back on the shelf.
"The Night the Ghost Got In", in The Thurber Carnival
When I consider how little of a rarity children are, -- that every street and blind alley swarms with them, -- that the poorest people commonly have them in most abundance, -- that there are few marriages that are not blest with at least one of these bargains, -- how often they turn out ill, and defeat the fond hopes of their parents, taking to vicious courses, which end in poverty, disgrace, the gallows, etc. -- I cannot for my life tell what cause for pride there can possibly be in having them. If they were young phoenixes, indeed, that were born but one in a year, there might be a pretext. But when they are so common --
"A Bachelor's Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People"
There are at least three themes which are utterly taboo as far as most American publishers are concerned. The two others are: a Negro-White marriage which is a complete and glorious success resulting in lots of children and grandchildren; and the total atheist who lives a happy and useful life, and dies in his sleep at the age of 106.
Writing in defence of his novel Lolita
It's easy to understand a fundamentalist world. It's just impossible to live in one.
In a review of the Starr report in the Globe & Mail, 09/19/1998
The spectator sport in Canada is hockey, not the sexual activities of our leaders. ... The Canadian people aren't nearly as starry-eyed in believing politicians are perfect. They hold a more healthy notion of their politicians as human beings.
Quoted in the Globe & Mail, 09/19/1998
In 1971 when I joined the staff of the MIT Artificial Intelligence lab, all of us who helped develop the operating system software, we called ourselves hackers. We were not breaking any laws, at least not in doing the hacking we were paid to do. We were developing software and we were having fun. Hacking refers to the spirit of fun in which we were developing software. The hacker ethic refers to the feelings of right and wrong, to the ethical ideas this community of people had -- that knowledge should be shared with other people who can benefit from it, and that important resources should be utilized rather than wasted.
Quoted in MEME 2.04
I do not suppose that a Man loses his Time, who is not engaged in publick Affairs, or in an illustrious Course of Action. On the contrary, I believe our Hours may very often be more profitably laid out in such Transactions as make no Figure in the World, than in such as are apt to draw upon them the Attention of Mankind. One may become wiser and better by several Methods of Employing one's self in Secrecy and Silence, and do what is laudable without Noise or Ostentation.
In the Spectator for March 4, 1712
No matter what we choose to say of it, Canada is a whole series of accidents. If it should expire in its present form the world would survive and so, almost certainly, would Canada's separate parts. I don't expect my children to suffer much if Quebec should withdraw or Canada withdraw from Quebec. ... Yet it's been a lovely place to grow up in, whether it was an accident or not.
The Man from Oxbow: The Best of Ralph Allen
To call such persons "humorists", a loose-fitting and ugly word, is to miss the nature of their dilemma and the dilemma of their nature. The little wheels of their invention are set in motion by the damp hand of melancholy.
"Preface to A Life", in The Thurber Carnival
A doctor saves lives -- it's up to people to create lives that are worth saving.
In Maclean's, Nov. 1974
Don't you know that love isn't just going to bed? Love isn't an act, it's a whole life. It's staying with her now because she needs you; it's knowing you and she will still care about each other when sex and daydreams, fights and futures -- when all that's on the shelf and done with. Love -- why, I'll tell you what love is: it's you at seventy-five and her at seventy-one, each of you listening for the other's step in the next room, each afraid that a sudden silence, a sudden cry, could mean a lifetime's talk is over.
The Luck of Ginger Coffey
So, if this were indeed my Final Hour, these would be my words to you. I would not claim to pass on any secret of life, for there is none, or any wisdom except the passionate plea of caring ... Try to feel, in your heart's core, the reality of others. This is the most painful thing in the world, probably, and the most necessary. In times of personal adversity, know that you are not alone. Know that although in the eternal scheme of things you are small, you are also unique and irreplaceable, as are all of your fellow humans everywhere in the world. Know that your commitment is above all to life itself.
Users should know that the system exists because of the idealistic vision of the GNU Project. Users should know that we worked for years towards this goal, at a time when most people said it was impossible and foolish. Then they will see that idealism is sometimes the only way to achieve an important practical result. Some of them will take this idealism seriously, and come to value their freedom strongly enough to help defend it when it is threatened. And that is what our community needs more than anything else.
On the linux-kernel mailing list, 6 Apr 1999
"Bime by I go hunt grotches in de voods." If you are susceptible to such things, it is not difficult to visualize grotches. They fluttered into my mind: ugly little creatures, about the size of whippoorwills, only covered with blood and honey and the scrapings of church bells.
"The Black Magic of Barney Haller", in The Thurber Carnival
In this manner an astounding mass of abstruse erudition, historical precedent, juridical texts, and oral testimony, drawn indiscriminately from Europe and Asia, was heaped and piled up over every point, until the real issue and its true aspect lay lost, hid, and shrivelled like a mummy under a huge pyramid. The dreary and flat waste of the voluminous record is studded here and there by these monuments of useless labour set up against each other by the indefatigable energy of the disputants.
From the section on the impeachment of Warren Hastings, in Notable Historical Trials, vol. 3
What men, in their imbecility, constantly mistake for a deficiency of intelligence in women is merely an incapacity for mastering small and trivial tricks. A man thinks that he is more intelligent than his wife because he can add up figures more accurately and because he understands the lingo of the stock market, and follows the doings of political mountebanks, and knows the minutiae of some sordid and degrading business or profession, say soap selling or the law. But these puerile talents are not really signs of intelligence; they are merely accomplishments, and they differ only in degree from the accomplishments of a trained chimpanzee.
The truth is that the capacity for mastering them is the sign of a petty mind, and Havelock Ellis, in his great study of English genius, shows that men of genius almost invariably lack it. One could not think of Shakespeare or Goethe or Beethoven multiplying 3,456,754 by 79,999 without making a mistake, nor could one think of them remembering the price of this or that stock last July, or the number of beans in a pound, or the freight rate on steel beams from Akron, Ohio, to Newport News, or concerning themselves about the cost of producing a stick of chewing gum, or the pay of street car conductors, or the credit of some obscure shopkeeper in Memphis, Tenn. Such idiotic concerns are beneath the dignity of first-rate minds.
That women always try to evade them -- that they have little capacity for the childish complexity of tricks upon which men base their so-called business and professional skill and cunning -- this is but one more proof of their intellectual aristocracy. They are not stumped by such enterprises because they are difficult, but because they are trivial.
"Meditations on the Fair"