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James Thurber

James Thurber Books

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Many Moons

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The 13 Clocks

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The Wonderful O

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“Like the great Gammeyer of Tarkington’s Gentle Julia, the poodle I knew seemed sometimes about to bridge the mysterious and conceivably narrow gap that separates instinct from reason. She could take part in your gaiety and your sorrow; she trembled to your uncertainties and lifted her head at your assurances. There were times when she seemed to come close to a pitying comprehension of the whole troubled scene and what lies behind it. If poodles, who walk so easily upon their hind legs, ever do learn the little tricks of speech and reason, I should not be surprised if they made a better job of it than Man, who would seem to be surely but not slowly slipping back to all fours.”

DogsPoodles
Book:Thurber's Dogs: A Collection of the Master's Dogs, Written and Drawn, Real and Imaginary, Legends All
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“Now I am a close friend of poodle dogs, having had a lot of them in my time, twenty-five in all, to be exact, I have never known, or even heard of, a bad poodle, Theirs is the most charming of species, including the human, and they happily lack Man’s aggression, irritability, quick temper, and wild aim. They have courage, too, and they fight well and fairly when they have to fight. The poodle, moving into battle, lowers its head, attacks swiftly, and finishes the business without idle rhetoric or false innuendo. One spring my French poodle, who was nine years old at the time, killed three red squirrels in ten seconds, thus saving the lives of hundreds of songbirds, the natural prey of the red marauders. She has never attacked a gray squirrel or a friendly dog, and while she has admittedly engaged in a cold war with cats since 1942, she is too gentle, and too smart, to try to take one apart to find out what makes it purr.”

DogsPoodles
Book:Thurber's Dogs: A Collection of the Master's Dogs, Written and Drawn, Real and Imaginary, Legends All
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“Legend has it that a hunting poodle would swim around all night in a lake hunting for a lost duck, which brings us to an ingenious explanation of the so-called Continental trim of the poodle, familiar to everybody and ridiculous to many. It seems that the back part of the poodle’s body was clipped to give it greater agility and speed in the water, that the “bracelets” on the front legs and the pompons or epaulettes near the hip bones were left there to prevent joints from becoming stiff after a long cold patrol of the fowling waters. The tale also tells (most recently in T. H. Tracy’s The Book of the Poodle) that the pompon on the end of the stubby tail was put there to serve as a kind of periscope by which the hunter could follow the movements of his dog in the water! The exclamation point is mine, because it is surely the front part of the swimming dog that can be most easily detected, and I am certain that before long somebody will put forward the theory that the red ribbon found in the head hair of some poodles was originally tied there to help the duck hunter locate his circling dog.”

DogsPoodles
Book:Thurber's Dogs: A Collection of the Master's Dogs, Written and Drawn, Real and Imaginary, Legends All
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“Very few persons have successfully transcribed the comic talents of a poodle into prose, whether typed or conversational. Something vital and essential dies in the telling of a poodle story. It is like a dim recording of a bad W. C. Fields imitator. My poodle, I am glad to say, does not meet a gentleman caller at the door and take his hat and gloves, or play the piano for guests, or move chessmen about upon a board, or wear glasses and smoke a pipe, or lift the receiver off the phone, or spell out your name in alphabet blocks, or sing “Madelon,” or say “Franchot Tone,” of give guests their after-dinner coffee cups. She is as smart as any of her breed; indeed she has taken on a special wisdom in what some would estimate to be her seventy-fifth, others her one-hundred-and-fifth year, as human lives are measured, but she has never been trained to do card tricks, or go into dinner on a gentleman’s arm, or to say ‘‘Beowulf," or even "Ralph.”

DogsPoodles
Book:Thurber's Dogs: A Collection of the Master's Dogs, Written and Drawn, Real and Imaginary, Legends All
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“We are a nation that has always gone in for the loud laugh, the wow, the yak, the belly laugh, and the dozen other labels for the roll- em-in-the-aisles gagerissimo. This is the kind of laugh that delights actors, directors, and producers, but dismays writers of comedy because it is the laugh that often dies in the lobby. The appreciative smile, the chuckle, the soundless mirth, so important to the success of comedy, cannot be understood unless one sits among the audience and feels the warmth created by the quality of laughter that the audience takes home with it.”

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Book:Collecting Himself: James Thurber on Writing and Writers, Humor and Himself
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