Humor Poetry Quotes

A fool will always find banana skins ~ Robert Priest

SMART

My dad gave me one dollar bill
'Cause I'm his smartest son,
And I swapped it for two shiny quarters
'Cause two is more than one!

And then I took the quarters
And traded them to Lou
For three dimes - I guess he don't know
That three is more than two!

Just then, along came old blind Bates
And just 'cause he can't see
He gave me four nickels for my three dimes,
And four is more than three!

And I took the nickels to Hiram Coombs
Down at the seed-feed store,
And the fool gave me five pennies for them,
And five is more than four!

And then I went and showed my dad,
And he got red in the cheeks
And closed his eyes and shook his head -
Too proud of me to speak! ~ Shel Silverstein

Here," Grace said as she opened the book again and tore out the page with the poem on it. I flinched as though I were in actual pain. "You should have it, if you like it. Pretty poetry is wasted on me." I took the paper from her and folded it and slipped it into my pocket, half of me horrified that she'd injured a book, the other half of me elated that she'd so willingly given me something that clearly meant a lot to her. ~ Krystal Sutherland

Contemporary poetry is a kind of Reykjavik, a place where accessibility and intelligence have been fighting a Cold War by proxy for the last half-century. ~ Nick Hornby

All of those who ask for, request or demand a title of this book will be asked to return it immediately. ~ Theodore Ficklestein

Not much more than a broke disgrace who's hooked on tonics, so excuse him if his poker face has puke on it. ~ Hannibal Lecture

My heart aches for you! But don't despair! I am persuaded you will come about! Recollect what the poet says! I'm not sure which poet, but very likely it was Shakespeare, because it generally is, though why I can't imagine! ~ Georgette Heyer

That was not sex. That was naked poetry. ~ Hank Moody

Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world. ~ Jasper Fforde

And Now for a Topic of International Concern:
Corn Thinks

/Kôrn/ -
It does not sink.
It does not blink.
It does not look pink–
Nor does it write in pen and ink.

It does not slink.
It does not link.
It does not like finks–
Nor does it lie; hood or play tiddlywinks.

It is distinct.
It is succinct.
It is not a Sphinx -
Corn thinks.

-Poems on the Run, Vol. I ~ Douglas Laurent

How do you know
you're a girl?
I'm wearing a frock.
And if you take
it off?
I get cold, so I put
it back on.
If I was a boy,
I don't know what
I'd do. ~ Ivor Cutler

You can only master something by loving it. ~ Lera Auerbach

I put a chameleon on a red dildo... He blushed ~ Bo Burnham

Bad breath and butt smell; that is prison, in a nutshell. ~ Raegan Butcher

I don't think you can define how you acquire your imagination any more than you can define why one person has a sense of humor and another doesn't. But I certainly would lean to the side that says all those solitary hours of daydreaming were a kind of training for poetry. ~ James Tate

Prickly
When I'm feeling
porcupine-y,
I get nasty,
I get whiny.
Stay away or
I might stick you.
My sharp words are
quills to prick you. ~ Laura Purdie Salas

Don't trust the heart, it wants your blood. ~ Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

I USED TO
make love.
Now I
Make coffee. ~ Chocolate Waters

Our father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name,
hollow be thy promises
and shallow be thy shame.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
On a scale from on to ten,
our Lord is totally eleven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
toasted close to dawn,
and forgive us our trespasses
as we shoot those who trespass on our lawn,
and lead us not into temptation,
such as pot or porno,
but deliver us from evil
(if not delivery, then DiGiorno). ~ Bo Burnham

If that kind of poetry doesn't make your bosom heave then I fear we shall never be friends. ~ Stephen Fry

The German language is so sonorous, isn't it? Beautiful language ... the language of poetry. Angry, angry poetry. ~ John Oliver

The German Censors - - - - - - - - - -
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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - Idiots - - - -
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- - - - - - - - - - ~ Heinrich Heine

A poem is a piece of semiotic sport, in which the signifier has been momentarily released from its grim communicative labours and can disport itself disgracefully. Freed from a loveless marriage to a single meaning, it can play the field, wax promiscous, gambol outrageously with similar unattached signifiers. If the guardians of conventional morality knew what scandalous stuff they were inscribing on their tombstones, they would cease to do so immediately. ~ Terry Eagleton

A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain. ~ Robert Frost

I can't even make up a rhyme about an umbrella, let alone death and life and eternal peace. ~ Knut Hamsun

As a kid, I loved 'Godot' because of the poetry and the humor and the strangeness, but then as you get older, it's much more resonant. ~ Nathan Lane

Rather a thousand times the county jail than to lie under this marble figure with wings and this granite pedestal bearing the words "pro patria." What do they mean anyway? ~ Edgar Lee Masters

I'll let no man in, unless of course, he knocks.
Walk right in to my heart with a thousand locks. ~ Casey Renee Kiser

Did the harebell loose her girdle
To the lover bee,
Would the bee the harebell hallow
Much as formerly? ~ Emily Dickinson

I take this continent with me into the grave. ~ Ray Bradbury

Sir U__ fell down from a speeding train,
Which did some damage to his brain,
And after that he did not know
How to pronounce the letter O. ~ Edward Gorey

Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage. ~ Pat Conroy

Also, it was the morning and it seemed a little odd to be thinking about poetry before luncheon. ~ Barbara Pym

It's important to have your private enjoyments because sometimes that's all we have. ~ Kay Ryan

It was a scary thought. A man could be surrounded by poetry reading and not know it. ~ Richard Russo

There is nothing like scrubbing toilets for a living to make you question the choices you have made in life. ~ Raegan Butcher

It costs me never a stab nor squirm / To tread by chance upon a worm. / Aha, my little dear, / I say, Your clan will pay me back one day. ~ Dorothy Parker

SAY EXACTLY
what you think
until you find that
no one is listening
then say
something else ~ Chocolate Waters

English kings married their cousins and so their kids were as sharp as clubs. ~ Peter Prasad

I really believe, or want to believe, really I am nuts, otherwise I'll never be sane. ~ Allen Ginsberg

Failure: the renewable resource. ~ Kay Ryan

Considering the number of ghastly love poems that had been written and which seemed fairly clearly a waste of everyone's time, Jonathan couldn't help but be surprised that coffee hadn't been thus immortalized. ~ James P. Blaylock

McGough: I'm sorry. I'm afraid I've caught poetry.
Mr Bones: Oh really? Well, don't worry, sir - I used to suffer from short stories.
McGough: Really? When?
Mr Bones: Oh, once upon a time ... ~ Graham Chapman

(1)BEING A POET
is like opening a car door
& exposing yourself.
(2)BEING A GOOD POET
is like opening the door
& exposing the passenger
as well. ~ Chocolate Waters

The zoologists who came from Germany to inseminate the elephant
wore bicycle helmets and protective rubber suits.
So as not to be soiled by effluvium and excrement,
which will alchemize to produce laughter in the human species,
how does that work biochemically is a question
to which I have not found an answer yet. ~ Lucia Perillo

Little Words
When you are gone, there is nor bloom nor leaf,
Nor singing sea at night, nor silver birds;
And I can only stare, and shape my grief
In little words.
I cannot conjure loveliness, to drown
The bitter woe that racks my cords apart.
The weary pen that sets my sorrow down
Feeds at my heart.
There is no mercy in the shifting year,
No beauty wraps me tenderly about.
I turn to little words- so you, my dear,
Can spell them out. ~ Dorothy Parker

A poet can survive everything but a misprint. ~ Oscar Wilde

At eight,

Pat Sajak said to me
in a dream

"You're not a loser
but
You're not a winner."

So,
I became a poet. ~ Casey Renee Kiser

With true love, you can move mountains, make unusual sacrifices, live a life of deprivations and still be happy. ~ Janvier Chouteu-Chando

It was deflating to realize how much my own family's quality of life might improve if I replaced myself with a Fundamentalist stay-at-home daughter. ~ Quinn Cummings

Glancing at the bottle of tequila in Tate's hand, Logan questioned much more calmly than he felt, "How full was that?"

Tate lifted the quarter-empty bottle and shrugged. "Unopened. Why? ~ Ella Frank

The cartoon me writes the books cartoon people read in the cartoon world, because they need things to read there too. ~ Neil Gaiman

Nobody likes me," he concluded at the tail end of a ten-minute pity fest.
"Can't imagine why," Quinn murmured. I turned my snort of laughter into a fake cough,
which was an embarrassingly feeble attempt at subterfuge when you consider the fact that
I didn't have any lungs. ~ Robin Wasserman

I like it when you reach into a vending machine to grab your candy bar, and that flap goes up to block you from reaching up? That's a good invention. Before that, it was hard times for the vending machine owners. "Yeah, what candy bar are you getting?" "That one, and every one on the bottom row!" ~ Mitch Hedberg

She suggested I keep a log of my dreams as a way of tracking the 'waning intensity of suffering.'

'I don't like the term "dream journal,"' she told me at our in-person appointment in June. 'I prefer "night vision log. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh

Did you just call me a numpty?"
"Yup. A delusional one."
"What, may I ask, is a numpty?"
"A person demonstrating a lack of knowledge of a situation; a silly person; an idiot; a dumbass. A delusional numpty: Joss Butler's stupid, idiotic, blind misconception of the true nature of her relationship with my brother, Braden Carmichael." She glowered at me, but it was an Ellie glower so it didn't really count.
I nodded my head. "Numpty. Good word."
She threw a cushion at me. ~ Samantha Young

I think the essence of humor has not changed. It's all about surprise, facilitating follows. But the context of humor has changed. Previously, the jokes were more related to current issues, political. Today people make about each other either funny or about people like Kim Kardashian. It's brutal. Everything is so much vielschmutziger. ~ Bette Midler

After twenty centuries of stony sleep, what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
W.B. Yeats - from 'The Second Coming ~ W.B.Yeats

I've just read that I am dead. Don't forget to delete me from your list of subscribers. ~ Rudyard Kipling

Spend the glittering moonlight there
Pursuing down the soundless deep
Limbs that gleam and shadowy hair,
Or floating lazy, half-asleep.
Dive and double and follow after,
Snare in flowers, and kiss, and call,
With lips that fade, and human laughter
And faces individual,
Well this side of Paradise! ...
There's little comfort in the wise. ~ Rupert Brooke

Poetry, for me, conveys the essence of narrative rather than its particulars. ~ Delia Sherman

Poetry is frosted fire. ~ J. Patrick Lewis

Life is like a double-blind experiment. And the Observer is the only One in on the Know. ~ Solange Nicole

Have you ever
smelled a smell
that brings you
instantly back
to a moment
from your
youth?
I always loved
that feeling.
I hope that's
what death is
just sitting on
clouds
smelling old
smells. ~ Atticus Poetry

I think the pleasure of form is that you have a companion with you besides all the poetry you have ever read. ~ Billy Collins

The greatest works of poetry are the stories we tell about ourselves. ~ Tara Conklin

Unbelievable! You are unbelievable! First you ruin my life and then you blame it on my period! ~ Jane Aire

I believe it was Gayelord Hauser, the nutritionist, who said, 'You are what you eat,' but if you happen to be an intellectual, you are what you quote. ~ Joseph Epstein

I began to write poetry again in 1975, when I fell in love with another woman. I returned to poetry not because I had "become a lesbian" - but because I had returned to my own body after years of alienation. The sensual details of life are the raw materials of a poet - and with that falling-in-love I was able to return to living fully in my own fleshly self. ~ Minnie Bruce Pratt

In a rich moonlit garden, flowers open beneath the eyes of entire nations terrified to acknowledge the simplicity of the beauty of peace. ~ Aberjhani

Once I saw Paris Hilton leaving a restaurant in Hollywood and the paparazzi cameras were all over her. It looked so unpleasant. It wasn't because she didn't look sensational - she was that perfect combination of fashionable and slutty - it was because the paparazzi guys were shouting these insanely rude and intrusive questions at her. Like, asking her who she was sleeping with and stuff. I was kind of interested in the answer, so I was glad they asked, but it was still gross. ~ Mindy Kaling

We made love outdoors
Without a roof, I like most,
Without stove, to make love, assuming the weather be fair and balmy, and the earth beneath be clean. Our souls intertwined and gushing of dew. ~ Roman Payne

My most humiliating thought:Medea would capture me,try to strip away my divine power and find I didn't have any left.
What is this? she would scream. There's nothing here but Lester!
Then she would kill me anyway. ~ Rick Riordan

In time, we found a common interest in poetry. He reads nothing else. Day in, day out. Never happier he is than when reading impassioned descriptions of hopeless agony or sundered hearts destroyed by wretchedness. ~ Jane Austen

We danced on broken glasses,
painting a bloody masterpiece on the floor.
The painful it got, the harder we danced.
We didn't care about scars because it was us, dancing on broken glasses - with each other. ~ J.A. ANUM

There's a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn't happen all the time. It's these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone - intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I'm in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don't with other art. ~ David Foster Wallace

...Eugene Sue's The Mysteries of Paris, a brilliant reenvisioning of one's own city as an exotic locale. Sue, who was too poor to travel, turned an awed gaze to the familiar and gave his readers a city they would recognize but which hid a poetry far from the familiar. ~ Andrei Codrescu

I am tempted to incapacitate him with the hemlock and then castrate him."
Lena paled. "I don't think that would be very wise," she said. "And the only knife we own is what I use for the cooking. You're not using that."
"I was planning on using a spoon," Honoria replied. ~ Bec McMaster

Paint me perfect poetry. ~ N'Zuri Za Austin

People are laughing at me today for having holes in my pockets, and ink blood on my fingers-
a thirty-something old writer, who strangles words from dictionaries, and feeds on the decay of poetry. ~ Anthony Liccione

About a month before I gave birth, Colin moved to LA full-time. Once Rudy arrived, Colin settled happily into his new role, returning to architecture when an interesting project cropped up. Pretty amazing, right? Unless you reverse the gender, and then it's what women who have the choice to stay home do 95 percent of the time. ~ Nell Scovell

No, no, no. There's no such thing as cheap and cheerful. It's cheap and nasty & expensive and cheerful. ~ Jeremy Clarkson

In the darkness and the snow, the street is empty
and it is just the night, the ice and me. ~ Miriam Joy

In paintings, music, poetry, architecture, we feel the elusive energy that moves through us and the air and the ground all the time, that usually disperses and turns chaotic in our busy-ness and distractedness and moodiness. Artists channel it, corral it, make it visible to the rest of us. The best works of art are like semaphores of our experience, signaling what we didn't know was true but do now. ~ Anne Lamott

Blossom

In April
the ponds open
like black blossoms,
the moon
swims in every one;
there's fire
everywhere: frogs shouting
their desire,
their satisfaction. What
we know: that time
chops at us all like an iron
hoe, that death
is a state of paralysis. What
we long for: joy
before death, nights
in the swale - everything else
can wait but not
this thrust
from the root
of the body. What
we know: we are more
than blood - we are more
than our hunger and yet
we belong
to the moon and when the ponds
open, when the burning
begins the most
thoughtful among us dreams
of hurrying down
into the black petals
into the fire,
into the night where time lies shattered
into the body of another. ~ Mary Oliver

Doubt you'd find anyone as dashingly charming as me ~ Veronica Purcell

We went to a Barnes and Noble, where I picked up an unauthorized
biography of M.C. Hammer, and not wanting to overload her on her first
book, I steered Dumb Dumb toward a Choose Your Own Adventure. ~ Chelsea Handler

The big kid hasn't said anything yet. 'I do like hearing myself talk,' I say, 'only because I have a lot of neat things to say, but eventually the conversation will run out in, like, four or five years, and then where will we be?'
Wonder of all wonders, he cracks a little smile. I don't blame him. I am pretty funny. ~ T.J. Klune

Those green irises were like gentle pools of brilliant meadows of sage and green-envy coneflowers swaying in a warm breeze.
HOLY fuck. What the hell sort of poetry was that dribbling out of my twisted brain? ~ Christine Zolendz

North," said the face beneath the sheet. "I belong to the National Association of Broadcasting Employees and Technicians. If you wake me up before I've slept twelve hours, I get paid short turnaround."
"But Rose
"
"If you wake me up before seven hours, I get to push a screwdriver into your lungs."
- from "The Scarred Man ~ Andrew Klavan

Sometimes you lie, Forest. Sometimes its the right thing to do."
"I don't believe that, Ben."
"And why is that?"
"Because it always catches up with you."
"It doesn't, not always."
"It does."
"Bullshit."
"It's the truth, Ben."
"No, Forest, it's another kind of lie. If Lizzie draws you a picture of a catfish and it looks like a big hairy turd, what do you tell her? That it looks like shit? That you could draw a better fucking catfish with a crayon up your asshole? No, Forest, you tell her it's the most beautiful catfish you ever saw, don't you? Of course you do. Truth's a slippery slope sometimes. ~ Jonathan Evison