Black Humour Quotes

Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow men', the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself? ~ Emil Cioran

My sister's partner leaves the room at some point and strides down the wide hallway to inspect the elevator my mother takes to the lobby every morning to buy her newspapers and flowers. My sister's partner is a handy person and wishes to inspect the elevator doors to see if there's any way to rig them to open onto a void when my mother pushes the button. ~ Vicki Laveau-Harvie

Now that Janet and Frances were older, Grandpa would let them visit him in his study, where the parrot lived. Grandpa came from a long line of parrot-keeping men, and Polly's predecessor, a white cockatoo, had fought with Wellington's armies in the Napoleonic Wars. Janet's father's earliest memories were of the astonishing oaths known to this bird, who was then a hundred and two years old and spoke in ripe gamey accents long since gone from the world of men. Grandpa believed that there must be a fair number of such long-lived birds in Scotland - even perhaps in England - and it would have been a fine thing to have them all gathered in a great dining hall, invoking ghostly midshipmen and dragoons, violent drinkers and merry rhymesters, perhaps even occasionally a lady of refinement. This, he said, would afford a historical experience of rare value; indeed, ancient parrots should be fêted and cultivated as true archivists. ~ Elspeth Barker

I still see the world as a place of bitter irony and black humour, failed hopes, dashed plans. I hope to make my work sparer, to outgrow my desire to show off. ~ Clive Sinclair

I should have learned mindfulness, and it's too late now because it's no good learning it when you're already in crisis: you have to start when things are good. But only the very, very oddest would think, Hey, my life is perfect. I know! I'll sit and waste twenty minutes Observing My Thoughts without Judgement. ~ Marian Keyes

Religion and nationalism? I defecate on the altar of religious conviction, and wipe my arse on the flag of national pride. ~ Ian Martin

He'd always liked women who'd talk back to him just a little bit. "Girls with balls" were good. Women with an actual mind of their own who could prove him wrong in something were, of course, castrating bitches who should be drowned in bottomless wells. ~ Warren Ellis

Moral writing is boring. ~ Johan Van Wyk

I like to judge people and it was clear to me that Colin's life has been about as exciting as a cluster headache. You can tell this just from his humour tumour which runs through every conversation you have with him. I got the impression that Colin had arrived at his early fifties resenting the fact that he's spent his entire career worshiping at the altar of Dynasty PLC. But he is now so indoctrinated by the world of corporate banking that he's forgotten how to express the real him.

This is what a life working for large corporations does to people. The workplace is a place not to be you; it's a place to be the corporate you. The you that doesn't really exist. We all see this corporate you and pretend that it's a normal part of life. But we know that something isn't quite right. We know that the real you is slowly fading away like old wallpaper. The corporate you is a myth; just like Icarus. And yet we are powerless against it. All of us are powerless against the wrath of the corporate world. ~ Rupert Dreyfus

It needs to said that Gerard Brennan's The Point is terrific. Scorchingly funny, black humour at its finest and the most inventive car theft ever! ~ Arlene Hunt

No one gets out of this world alive...except astronauts. ~ Stewart Stafford

What a Life: Give some of us pills to stop a fit, give the rest shock to start one. ~ Ken Kesey

The nurses' job is emotional and distressing. Their day-to-day work is dealing with people withering and falling to pieces. So black humour is essential for them cope with that. It's just a consequence of their environment. ~ Peter Capaldi

Ha!' cackled the fiend, 'I expect you'd like revenge on that husband of yours. Murder shouldn't go unpunished, and no creature enjoys delivering chastisement as much as I. What about giving him a taste of his own medicine? If you'd be so kind as to lend me your body, I'll set him dancing to my tune.'

The wife's spectre grimaced and nodded, at which the wicked Likho stripped off the nightgown, then the dead woman's pliant skin, peeling back the flaccid folds. These it left in a slack heap.

It gobbled her flesh and sucked the bones clean. These it hid behind the stove, before inserting itself inside the empty, wrinkled carcass, taking the former position of the corpse. Its fat tongue swiped the last juices from around its lips.

When the husband returned home, all was as it had been; there was not a speck of blood to be seen, although the strangest smell of rotten eggs lingered ~ Emmanuelle De Maupassant

What a magnificent body, how I should like to see it on the dissecting table. ~ Ivan Turgenev

My daughter told me she wasn't afraid of spider but that she was afraid of my smoking. She said that she was afraid of my dying. So i went downstairs, picked up a pair of pliers and a blowtorch and showed her what real fear was. ~ Robert Clark

Lamb stood, gazed at the nearest tree as if in sudden awe of nature, lifted a heel from the ground and farted.

"Sign of a good curry," he said, "Sometimes they just bubble about inside you for ages."

"I keep meaning to ask why you have never married," River said. ~ Mick Herron

In the midst of thinking we r having fun, doing wrong knowingly, we humans tend to loose more than what we had/have. We know the price but still we do it. How hard is it to just do the right thing so to loose nothing? ~ Henry Lali

As if all of that hadn't been enough, I had foolishly chosen to wear a brand-new pair of Jimmy Choo mules to school, purchased at a fraction of their normal retail cost at an outlet over the summer. They were gorgeous, and they went perfectly with the Calvin Klein black denim skirt I had paired with a hot pink scoop-neck top.
But of course they were killing me. I already had raw, painful blisters around the bases of all my toes, and the Band-Aids the nurse had given me to cover them so that I could at least hobble between classes were not exactly doing the job. My feet felt like they were about to fall off. If I'd known where Jimmy Choo lived, I would have hobbled right up to his front door and popped him one in the eye. ~ Meg Cabot

The flashing black line on an empty Word document reminds me that my life is counting down second by second, and that if I don't write I'll have wasted my time here on earth. ~ Jarod Kintz

2 grilled chicken breasts, diced 1 avocado, peeled and diced 5-6 green lettuce leaves, cut in stripes 3-4 green onions, finely chopped 5-6 radishes, sliced 7-8 grape tomatoes 2 tbsp lemon juice 3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil 1 tsp dried mint salt and black pepper, to taste ~ Alissa Noel Grey

Individual members of certain churches in black communities should protest when worship services become a platform for teaching anti-gay sentiments. Often individuals sit and listen to preachers raging against gay people and think the views expressed are amusing and outmoded, and dismiss them without challenge. But if homophobia is to be eradicated in black communities, such attitudes must be challenged. ~ Bell Hooks

Me? I'm the king of the twentieth century. I'm the bogeyman. The villain ... The black sheep of the family. ~ Alan Moore

I am girl of definitions, of logic, of black and white.
Remember this. ~ Cecelia Ahern

I had a vision with which I might have saved my people, but I had not the strength to do it. ~ Black Elk

Moths fly toward burning bulbs not because they're drunk
with love or exhausted from flight, wanting to wait out
the pain in their wings, as if waiting was something warm
they could wrap themselves around. They fly and die
simply because they cannot see what we see.
Instead they see stars off in the distance, the same stars
we long ago used to navigate the darkness
we still know nothing about. It's hard to imagine
what we once needed to know to know where we were.
Without depth, with color, the moths look to the light
until it calls to them. We are good at thinking we can stay.
We are good at finding hurt. I live in a mapped city
that keeps expanding like regret. When I look out the window
I see a house so close I can hear a toilet flush.
At night we take black lights and hunt scorpions
stuck to our stucco walls. I walk around darkening rooms
not in use, but I cannot stop the sun
or streetlights from shining in. We are all aglow.
I don't want to think about the sun burning
out or the billion small deaths I continue to cause.
Even in the desert, a place whose name I learned
to spell by the sweet treat of its opposite, the extra s
demanding more, even after all these years of genetics,
of rock slides, of canyons cut deep and persistent
as a heart, moths spin in circles toward their stars. ~ Josh Rathkamp

He spent a very uncomfortable few moments trying to remember his prepared position for explaining to God that he had nonetheless been right not to believe in Him on the basis of all available evidence, and that his empiricism and advocacy of sceptical enquiry was vindicated because faith-based belief had proven hugely detrimental to humankind's welfare. At the same time, another part of his brain was busy thinking: Please don't let the Catholics be right, please don't let the Catholics be right. ~ Christopher Brookmyre

I like for things to happen, for stories to unfold. And if I can't find a good enough story, I make one. ~ Holly Black

I saw our golden years on a black gale,
our time of love spilt in the furious dust.
"O we are winter-caught, and we must fail,"
said the dark dream, "and time is overcast."
-And woke into the night; but you were there,
and small as seed in the wild dark we lay.
Small as seed under the gulfs of air
is set the stubborn heart that waits for day.
I saw our love the root that holds the vine
in the enduring earth, that can reply,
"Nothing shall die unless for me it die.
Murder and hate and love alike are mine";
and therefore fear no winter and no storm
while in the knot of earth that root lies warm. ~ Judith A. Wright

Science has revealed a universe that is vast, ancient, violent, strange, and beautiful, a universe of almost infinite variety and possibility one in which time can end in a black hole, and conscious beings can evolve from a soup of minerals. ~ Leonard Mlodinow

Haw Par Villa is the nutty exception. It's mad, slightly unhinged and overwhelmingly rubbish. Without a doubt, Haw Par Villa is the Louis Tussaus House of Wax of Singapore. There is no higher compliment (...) For it's own sake, Haw Par Villa still had to be terrible, macabre, distasteful and offensive. ~ Neil Humphreys

AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER.
Terry took Death's arm and followed him through the doors and on to the black desert under the endless night. The End. ~ Rhianna Pratchett

There are a thousand ways for a boy of fifteen to go wrong. The most gently reared will lash out, battered by gusts of mindless fury. The brightest can be swamped by black despair. The sweetest may turn sullen and withdrawn. The most rational are quick to anger. ~ Mary Doria Russell

We will enjoy ourselves with the forms that are given us: a human face, a hand, the breast of a woman or the body of a man, a glad or sorrowful expression, the infinite seas, the wild rocks, the melancholy language of the black trees in the snow, the wild strength of spring flowers and the heavy lethargy of a hot summer day when Pan, our old friend, sleeps and the ghosts of midday whisper. This alone is enough to make us forget the grief of the world, or to give it form. ~ Max Beckmann

You can love your job, but your job will not love you back. ~ Cathie Black

They walked as it were in a black vapour wrought of veritable darkness itself that, as it was breathed, brought blindness not only to eyes but to the mind, so that even the memory of colours and of forms and of any light faded out of thought. Night had always been, and always would be, and night was all. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Michael: 'Hey, remember when I almost didn't let you into the house that first day you came?'
Claire: 'Yep'
Michael: 'Well, I was dead wrong. Maybe I never said that out loud before, but I mean it, Claire. All that's happened since ... we wouldn't have made it. Not me, not Shane, not Eve. Not without you.'
Claire: 'It's not me. It's not! It's us, that's all. We're just better together. We ... take care of each other.'
Shane: 'Stop vamping up my girl, man. She needs coffee.'
Michael: 'Don't we all. Vamping up your girl? Dude. That's low.'
Shane: 'Digging for China. Come on. ~ Rachel Caine

We're in crisis mode as black actresses. It's not only in the sheer number of roles that are offered and that are out there, but the quality of the roles. The quality - and therein lies the problem. We're in deprivation mode because me, Alfre and Phylicia, we're in the same category. Whereas if you take a Caucasian actress, you have the one who are the teens, in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s - they're all different. There are roles for each of them. But you only have two or three categories for black actresses. ~ Viola Davis

It is obvious that the great majority of humans throughout history have had grossly, even ridiculously, unrealistic concepts of the world. Man is, among many other things, the mistaken animal, the foolish animal. Other species doubtless have much more limited ideas about the world, but what ideas they do have are much less likely to be wrong and are never foolish. White cats do not denigrate black, and dogs do not ask Baal, Jehovah, or other Semitic gods to perform miracles for them. ~ George Gaylord Simpson

The idea that blacks, or anyone for that matter, need the government to get ahead in life is despicable. And even more important, this idea is a failure. Our communities are just as poor as they've always been. Our schools continue to fail children. Our prisons are filled with young black men who should be at home being fathers. Our self-initiative and our self-reliance have been sacrificed in exchange for allegiance to our overseers who control us by making us dependent on them. ~ Elbert Guillory

How could anyone mistake Mom for white? Mom was a proud black woman, the proudest I knew. She hated us having to take welfare food, hated accepting anything we needed but did not earn. We had a picture of Marcus Garvey on the living-room wall, talking about going back to Africa, talking about the power of blackness and the strength of the Negro heart. I couldn't imagine looking at Mom and not seeing that. ~ Ilyasah Shabazz

Karpo, as always, was dressed in black. His leather coat was black. Even his scarf and fur hat were black. Rostnikov thought that clothes reflected the people who wore them. Rostnikov himself dressed neatly, conservatively, in old comfortable suits and ties Sarah had bought for him at market stalls. As for Karpo's choice of black, Rostnikov was not given to simple judgment. He himself was rather fond of black, which was either the absence of color or the totality of color. There was a statement in black, he thought. Black said, You cannot penetrate my being by looking at my exterior. I am a dark cipher. ~ Stuart M. Kaminsky

How much easier life would be if people were all black or all white and how much simpler it would be to act in regard to them! ~ W. Somerset Maugham

I tell you one thing. Black and Asian people should come here [to Europe] in the hundreds of millions. It's not right that for 500 years, imperialism has looted our countries of all our wealth, has destroyed our countries. We will come here, we have been coming here, and we will continue to come here in hundreds of millions until indeed, as Gaddafi said, Europe will turn black. ~ Sukant Chandan

Do some good to the ghetto, Mr. Kris Kringle.
Come and stay awhile, kick it with God's Angels.
Take and acknowledge my wisdom and understand
That Santa Claus is a black man. ~ Keith Murray

I scroll past images every bit as violent and beautiful as Jeb's paintings: luminious, rainbow-skinned creatures with bulbous eyes and sparkly, silken wings who carry knives and swords; hideous, naked hobgoblins in chains who crawl on all fours and have corkscrew tails and cloven feet like pigs; silvery pixielike beings trapped in cages and crying oily black tears. ~ A.G. Howard

One strain of African American thought holds that it is a violent black recklessness - the black gangster, the black rioter - that strikes the ultimate terror in white America. Perhaps it does, in the most individual sense. But in the collective sense, what this country really fears is black respectability, Good Negro Government. It applauds, even celebrates, Good Negro Government in the unthreatening abstract - The Cosby Show, for instance. But when it becomes clear that Good Negro Government might, in any way, empower actual Negroes over actual whites, then the fear sets in, the affirmative-action charges begin, and birtherism emerges. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates