James Thurber Quotes

Moods are complicated and very much a part of who we are. People would be very boring without them.

I tried to have more than one emotion on the record.

I find Spike Jones' movies to be really very inventive and funny, but they're really sad and touching and really key into the different facets of the human experience.

My music has to be funny and sad and happy and loving; it's gotta have it all. When somebody's just too dark all the time, it's just drama. Or if somebody's too funny? Well, I like being too funny sometimes.

How much better is it to weep at joy than to joy at weeping?

It is difficult for people to appreciate their own laughter unless you show them some pathos along the way.

Laughter isn't even the other side of tears. It is tears turned inside out. Truly the suffering is great, here on earth.

If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that’s a full day.

Laughter is more serious than tears.

For public opinion does not admit that lofty rapturous laughter is worthy to stand beside lofty lyrical emotion and that there isall the difference in the world between it and the antics of a clown at a fair.

...there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing.

Lord, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low.

In my own work, humor is necessary, for the reasons stated above, but also because forbidding your characters silliness, absurdity, irony, and vulgarity forbids them aspects of the human experience every bit as universal as sorrow.

The novelist is the person who spends a lot of his or her day thinking about the human drama and emotional complexity.

I love life... Well yeah, and I'm sad, but at the same time I'm really happy that something could make me feel that sad. It's like, it makes me feel alive, you know? It makes me feel human. And the only way I could feel this sad now is if I felt somethin' really good before. So I have to take the bad with the good, so I guess what I'm feelin' is like a, beautiful sadness.

Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.

It's not true unless it makes you laugh, but you don't understand it until it makes you weep.

Our lives are complex; our emotions are complex; our intellectual desires are complex. I believe that architecture … needs to mirror that complexity in every single space that we have, in every intimacy that we possess.

When I am happy I feel like crying, but when I am sad I don’t feel like laughing. I think it is better to be happy; then you get two feelings for the price of one.

The challenge has always been to wrest emotion out of a doll face that we think of as only having one emotion. It's moving a light, moving my camera; it's just this mental investment that I make, and suddenly, everything changes.

I like to hear songs which can lay it all on, songs which can look at the dark side as well as the bright side, sometimes they can be as strong as each other. Love and hatred are close.

I wish to cry. Yet, I laugh, and my lipstick leaves a red stain like a bloody crescent moon on top of the beer can

Sometimes there are more tears than laughter, and sometimes there is more laughter than tears, and sometimes you feel so choked you can neither weep nor laugh. For tears and laughter there will always be so long as there is human life. When our tear wells have run dry and the voice of laughter is silenced, the world will be truly dead.

Gail Godwin has written a book about the heaviest matters of loss, grief, and loneliness with a touch so light that I was as often deeply amused by it as I was deeply moved.

I really feel our job as actors is to find a human experience in the character. So, for me, genre comes second; it's about script and the emotional journey of that character. Genre definitely has an impact, but it has more of an impact on the way the character is expressed. We all have the same core emotions of love, jealousy, rage - it's just how they're expressed.