Laughable Quotes

Girls and women, in their new, particular unfolding, will only in passing imitate men's behavior and misbehavior and follow in male professions. Once the uncertainty of such transitions is over it will emerge that women have only passed through the spectrum and the variety of those (often laughable) disguises in order to purify their truest natures from the distorting influences of the other sex. Women, in whom life abides and dwells more immediately, more fruitfully and more trustingly, are bound to have ripened more thoroughly, become more human human beings, than a man, who is all too light and has not been pulled down beneath the surface of life by the weight of a bodily fruit and who, in his arrogance and impatience, undervalues what he thinks he loves. This humanity which inhabits woman, brought to term in pain and humiliation, will, once she has shrugged off the conventions of mere femininity through the transformations of her outward status, come clearly to light, and men, who today do not yet feel it approaching, will be taken by surprise and struck down by it. One day (there are already reliable signs which speak for it and which begin to spread their light, especially in the northern countries), one day there will be girls and women whose name will no longer just signify the opposite of the male but something in their own right, something which does not make one think of any supplement or limit but only of life and existence: the female human being.

This ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Every one of my novels could be entitled The Unbearable Lightness of Being or The Joke or Laughable Loves; the titles are interchangeable, they reflect the small number of themes that obsess me, define me, and unfortunately, restrict me. Beyond these themes, I have nothing else to say or write. ~ Milan Kundera

My dear
colleagues, as you know, the greatest misfortune for a man is a happy marriage; he hasn't the
slightest hope of a divorce. ~ Milan Kundera

His mother had always been a headstrong woman, and with her grayish-white mane and unsmiling face, she appeared as regal and intimidating as she had ever been. Still, seeing her through other people's eyes, Hanfeng realized that all that made her who she was - the decades of solitude in her widowhood, her coldness to the prying eyes of people who tried to mask their nosiness with friendliness, and her faith in the notion of living one's own life without having to go out of one's way for other people - could be deemed pointless and laughable. Perhaps the same could be said of any living creature: a caterpillar chewing on a leaf, unaware of the beak of an approaching bird; an egret mesmerized by its reflection in a pond, as if it were the master of the universe; or Hanfeng's own folly of repeating the same pattern of hope and heartbreak, hoping despite heartbreak. ~ Yiyun Li

I don't like anything unsigned in a newspaper that purports to be the opinion of some group if we don't know who the group is. It's laughable to say that The Miami Herald's editorials or any newspaper's editorials represent any views other than those of the people writing them, so why don't we tell everybody who they are? ~ Dave Barry

My paper has to be very long and complex," I said. "I shall cite all the great thinkers - Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud." "What about Adolf Hitler?" "Oh, him. He's not a thinker. He's just a ranter and raver." "There may come a time," said Pepi, "when people cannot tell the difference." "Impossible," I solemnly predicted. "I have read Hitler's book Mein Kampf and also some works by his colleague Herr Alfred Rosenberg because I am a fair-minded, objective person and I believe one should always hear out all sides before making a decision, and so I can tell you from firsthand knowledge that these men are idiots. Their ideas about how the Jews have poisoned their so-called superior Aryan race and caused all of Germany's troubles are utter nonsense. No intelligent person could possibly believe them. Hitler is laughable. He will soon disappear." "Just like all your old boyfriends," Pepi said with his sly smile. ~ Edith Hahn Beer

The myriad-minded man, our, and all men's, Shakespeare, has in this piece presented us with a legitimate farce in exactest consonance with the philosophical principles and character of farce, as distinguished from comedy and from entertainments. A proper farce is mainly distinguished from comedy by the licence allowed, and even required, in the fable, in order to produce strange and laughable situations. The story need not be probable, it is enough that it is possible. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The idea that somehow you're going to tax the 'rich' enough to pay for quality health care for every American who doesn't have it, can't afford it or stands to lose it, not to mention for all of the undocumented aliens who receive it for free now and presumably will continue to in Obama health land, is almost laughable. ~ Susan Estrich

School is not meant for the poor, only for the rich. ~ Olusegun Obasanjo

The idea of a young thin woman who weighs 100 pounds driving herself around in a 4,000 pound SUV is laughable. ~ Peter Diamandis

I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world. ~ Emil Cioran

Kings of a bakery? The very suggestion was laughable. How easy it was to assume that elsewhere was infinitely better than where you stood. Sometimes at night, she dreamed of the TEXAS, U.S.A. magazine advertisement, envisioning a land with row upon row of fat loaves laden with jeweled fruits; bread cubes sodden with thick lamb stew; sugar-dusted sweet breads, ginger-spiced cookies, and fat wedges of chocolate cake soaked in Kirschwasser. She'd awake with cold drool down her chin. Regardless of the family's lack of resources, one of Papa's famous Black Forest cakes had miraculously prevailed. Dressed in a layer of bittersweet chocolate shavings ~ Sarah McCoy

National historical myths are a way of giving identity and more authenticity to a people. Exodus flattered the Jews half a millennium after it allegedly took place by making them feel like heroic refugees from slavery, and righteous conquerors of a land corrupted by paganism, wealth, and sex. The Illiad made the politicians, merchants, sailors, farmers, and schoolteachers of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. into the heirs of austere, remorseless, honorable, courageous warriors, a race of demigods. Contrast this with the real Athenians of ca. 375 B.C. -- their bellies full of fishcakes, their throats bloated with cheap resined wine, their far-flung sharp commercial deals a laughable, reverse mirror-image of the noble warriors of the Trojan War era. ~ Norman F. Cantor

We tend to lament this seemingly endless parceling of Christianity (which, let's face it, can indeed get out of hand), but I'm not convinced the pursuit of greater unity means rejecting denominationalism altogether. A worldwide movement of more than two billion people reaching every continent and spanning thousands of cultures for over two thousand years can't expect homogeneity. And the notion that a single tradition owns the lockbox on truth is laughable, especially when the truth we're talking is God. ~ Rachel Held Evans

It's malarkey. When you tell people that the roof crushing in on your head is not the cause of injury, it's your head hitting the roof, it's laughable. ~ Joan Claybrook

Curran smiled.
"What's so funny?"
"Your panties have a bow," he said.
I looked down. I was wearing a short tank top - not mine - and my blue panties with a narrow white strip of lace at the top and a tiny white bow. Would it have killed me to check what I was wearing before I pulled the blanket down? "What's wrong with bows?"
"Nothing." He was grinning now. "I expected barbed wire. Or one of those steel chains."
Wiseass. "I'm secure enough in myself to wear panties with bows on them. Besides, they are comfy and soft."
"I bet." He almost purred.
I gulped. Okay, I needed to either crawl back into bed and cover myself with the blanket or get the hell to the bathroom and back. Since I didn't fancy peeing on myself, the bathroom was my only option.
"I don't suppose you'd mind giving me a bit of privacy for my trip?"
"Not a chance," he said.
I tried to get off the bed. Everything was under control until my weight actually hit my legs and then the room decided to crawl sideways. Curran caught me. His arm hugged my back, his touch sending an electric shiver along my skin. Oh no.
"Need some help, ass kicker?"
"I'm fine, thanks." I pushed away from him. He held on to me for a second, letting me know that he could restrain me against my will with laughable ease, and let go. I clenched my teeth. Enjoy it while it lasts. I'll be back on my feet soon.
I walked away from him, successfully maintaining vertical position, and ze ~ Ilona Andrews

At the base of her ankle is a deep, ugly scar she got when a car ran over her foot when she was six years old. That was in a small town in Bangladesh. Thus, even today, she hesitates superstitiously before crossing the road, and is painfully shy of walking distances. Her fears make her laughable. The scar is printed on her skin like a radiant star. ~ Amit Chaudhuri

To know what questions may reasonably be asked is already a great and necessary proof of sagacity and insight. For if a question is absurd in itself and calls for unnecessary answers, it not only brings disgrace to the person raising it, but may prompt an incautious listener to give absurd answers, thus presenting, as the ancients said, the laughable spectacle of one person milking a he-goat, and another holding the sieve underneath. ~ Immanuel Kant

The laughable is a species of what is disgraceful. ~ Aristotle.

The thing I was beginning to figure out about Sam and Grace, the thing about Sam not being able to function without her, was that that sort of love only worked when you were sure both people would always be around for each other. If one half of the equation left, or died, or was slightly less perfect in their love, it became the most tragic, pathetic story invented, laughable in its absurdity. Without Grace, Sam was a joke without a punch line. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

They had been talking about his friend Z. when she announced, "If I hadn't met you, I'd certainly have fallen in love with him."
Even then, her words had left Tomas in a strange state of melancholy, and now he realized it was only a matter of chance that Tereza loved him and not his friend Z. Apart from her consummated love for Tomas, there were, in the realm of pos­sibility, an infinite number of unconsummated loves for other men.
We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same; we feel that Beethoven himself, gloomy and awe-inspir­ing, is playing the "Es muss sein!" to our own great love.
Tomas often thought of Tereza's remark about his friend Z. and came to the conclusion that the love story of his life exemplified not "Es muss sein!" (It must be so), but rather "Es konnte auch anders sein" (It could just as well be otherwise). ~ Milan Kundera

If you curse the world, it will bring you sorrow.'
'I'm already so unhappy it's laughable. ~ Satoshi Mizukami

They were together constantly, for lunch, for dinner, and nearly every evening - always in a sort of breathless hush, as if they feared that any minute the spell would break and drop them out of this paradise of rose and flame. But the spell became a trance, seemed to increase from day to day; they began to talk of marrying in July - in June. All life was transmitted into terms of their love, all experience, all desires, all ambitions, were nullified - their senses of humor crawled into corners to sleep; their former love-affairs seemed faintly laughable and scarcely regretted juvenalia. For ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

So, really," continued Jacob as if this were perfectly normal to expound on art in these circumstances, "when you think about it, the artists who make people stop and think, who push the form, who make you uncomfortable, who are laughable, well, they're the ones who get remembered." Idly, Jacob dug a hole in the snow with his shovel and then another one next to it. "So why wouldn't you want to join the ranks of the ridiculed? ~ Justina Chen

The universe deepened at that moment, the music of the spheres grew from a mere chorus to a symphony as triumphant as Beethoven's Ninth, and I knew that I would always be able to hear it when I wished or needed to, always be able to Use it to take the step I needed to see the one I loved, or, failing that, step to the place where I had been with the one I loved, or, failing that, find a place to love for its own beauty and richness.
The energy of quasars and exploding stellar nuclei filled me then. I was borne up on waves of energy more lovely and more lyrical even than the Ouster angels' wings seen sliding along corridors of sunlight. The shell of deadly energy that was my prison and execution cell seemed laughable now, Schrödinger's original joke, a child's jump rope laid around me on the ground as restraining walls.
I stepped out of the Schrödinger cat box and out of Armaghast System. ~ Dan Simmons

It's laughable, looking back, to see the processes I went through, pretending to make a reasoned decision. No choice is ever made on the basis of logic; the logic is fabricated around the impulse, the initial desire which is innate and incontrovertible. All the time, I knew where I was going, the elements of my fulfillment or ruin were always present; I only had to work my way into that seam of desire and find the hidden vein of dross or gold. It's not a question of predestination, it's just that free will and destiny are illusions, false opposites, consolations. In the end, they are one and the same: a single process. You choose what you choose and it could not have been otherwise: the choice is destiny. It was there all along, but any alternative you might have considered is an absurd diversion, because it is in your nature to make one choice rather than another. That is identity. To speak of freedom or destiny is absurd because it suggests there is something outside yourself, directing your life, where really it is of the essence: identity, the craftwork of the soul. ~ John Burnside

And remember that striptease of hers, just remember how deeply she was experiencing it! It was the saddest striptease I've ever seen. She was passionately trying to strip and at the same time she still remained in the hated confinement of her nurse's uniform. She was trying to strip and couldn't. And although she knew that she wouldn't strip, was trying to, because she wanted to communicate to us her sad and unrealizable desire to strip. Chief, she wasn't stripping, she was singing the elegy of stripping, singing about the impossibility of stripping, about the impossibility of making love, about the impossibility of living! And we didn't even want to hear it. We looked at the floor and we were unsympathetic. ~ Milan Kundera

It is really laughable to see what different ideas are prominent in various naturalists' minds, when they speak of 'species'; in some, resemblance is everything and descent of little weight-in some, resemblance seems to go for nothing, and Creation the reigning idea-in some, descent is the key,-in some, sterility an unfailing test, with others it is not worth a farthing. It all comes, I believe, from trying to define the undefinable. ~ Charles Darwin

The very ironic, almost laughable thing about all of this, is that all the punishment and pain you're inflicting on yourself is an infinitely harder way to accomplish your end goal of looking and feeling good. ~ Callie Bowld

Do you think it was my fault that she drank?" my father asked not long ago. It's the assumption of an amateur, someone who stops after his second vodka tonic and quits taking his pain medication before the prescription runs out. It's almost laughable, this insistence on a reason. I think my mother was lonely without her children - her fan club. But I think she drank because she was an alcoholic. ~ David Sedaris

Abstraction in photography is ridiculous, and is only an imitation of painting. We stopped imitating painters a hundred years ago, so to imitate them in this day and age is laughable. ~ Berenice Abbott

Why should not every individual man have existed more than once upon this world? Why should I not come back as often as I am capable of acquiring fresh knowledge? Is this hypothesis so laughable merely because it is the oldest? Because the human understanding, before the sophistries of the schools had dissipated and debilitated it, lighted upon it at once? ~ Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Let us fill a cup and drink to that most noble, ridiculous, laughable, sublime figure in our lives ... The Young Man Who Was. Let us drink to his dreams, for they were rainbow-colored; to his appetites, for they were strong; to his blunders, for they were huge; to his pains for they were sharp; to his time for it was brief; and to his end, for it was to become one of us. ~ Herman Wouk

Too Much to Ask
It seemed too much to ask of one small virgin that she should stake shame against the will of God. All she had to hold to, later, were those soft, inward flutterings and the remembered surprise of a brief encounter - spirit with flesh. Who would think it more than a dream wish? An implausible, laughable defense.
And ~ Luci Shaw

Laughter, on the other hand, " Petrarch went on, "is an explosion that tears us away from the world and throws us back into our own cold solitude. Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry. That's why I tell you yet again, and you want to keep in mind: Boccaccio doesn't understand love. Love can never be laughable. Love has nothing in common with laughter. ~ Milan Kundera

The man of understanding finds everything laughable. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I Suddenly Dont Understand Anything And Am Currently Casting Sincere Doubt On The Laughable Insinuation That I Or Anyone Else Ever Actually Did For Even A Single Moment ~ Andrew Hussie

It was another horrible yet almost laughable moment. Cupcakes and birthday car sex had been my undoing. ~ Richelle Mead

It's so laughable that it's somewhere beyond comedy and right into tragedy again. ~ Libba Bray

The idea that money is corrupting innocent politicians would be laughable if it did not lead to such dangerous legislation ... ~ Thomas Sowell

My technique is laughable at times. I have developed a style of my own, I suppose, which creeps around. I don't have to have too much technique for it. I've developed the parts of my technique that are useful to me. I'll never be a very fast guitar player. I don't really know what to say about my style. There's always a melodic intent in there. ~ David Gilmour

With an earnestness that would be laughable in a person who wasn't from Wisconsin. ~ Jennifer Egan

Members of Congress are incredibly blessed and fortune to have the jobs that we have. Nobody makes us run. Every two years we offer for public office, and if you don't want to do it then don't run. But the notion that you can make $174,000 in this country and be underpaid is laughable. ~ Trey Gowdy

The most laughable White House criticism is that tax cuts are a 'free lunch.' The American people's work created that money. Only in Washington could there be a belief that letting people keep more of what they create is a giveaway. ~ Steve Forbes

As far as where I go when I die, the concept that I am simple going to flick out, like a light bulb, to me is not only spiritually impossible to believe, but logically it is laughable - the idea that we simply die and nothing happens. ~ Stephen King

Might I be ridiculous? Might my career in music be laughable? Yeah, that's possible, but that's certainly not my intention. ~ Joaquin Phoenix

Without warning, Wesley lifted me up onto the pool table. His hands moved to my shoulders, and a second later, I was flat on my back, staring up at him as he smirked. He shifted so that he was on the table too, leaning over me with his face only inches from mine.
"On the pool table?" I said, narrowing my eyes at him. "Seriously?"
"I can't resist," he said. "You know, you're pretty sexy when you're pissed at me, Duffy."
First, I was struck by the irony of that statement. I mean, he used sexy and Duffy-implying I was fat and ugly-in the same sentence. The contrast was almost laughable. Almost. ~ Kody Keplinger

The idea that if you are very clever you shouldn't be an actor would be laughable in Russia. ~ Samuel West

The media is the thought-form of the technological society, and it finds nothing it does to be laughable, a sure sign that it is not human. ~ Donald Phillip Verene

Ruin, therefore, is not caused by lavatories but it's something that starts in people's heads. So when these clowns start shouting "Stop the ruin!" - I laugh!' 'I swear to you, I find it laughable! Every one of them needs to hit himself on the back of the head and then when he has knocked all the hallucinations out of himself and gets on with sweeping out backyards - which is his real job - all this "ruin" will automatically disappear ~ Mikhail Bulgakov

I went from wanting to lick his dimples to wanting to get the hell away from him. ~ Colleen Hoover

A cocktail or two, or several, I found, cheered me up for the foolishness of foolish people. A cocktail, or several, before dinner, enabled me to laugh whole-heartedly at things which had long since ceased being laughable. The cocktail was a prod, a spur, a kick, to my jaded mind and bored spirits. ~ Jack London

How much truth is contained in something can be best determined by making it thoroughly laughable and then watching to see how much joking around it can take. For truth is a matter that can withstand mockery, that is freshened by any ironic gesture directed at it. Whatever cannot withstand satire is false. ~ Peter Sloterdijk

Some men want to believe their kingship will make them stronger, more invulnerable to life's sorrows so that hurts do not hurt, pain is laughable. They are surprised to discover the paradox of strength - only the truly vulnerable possess the ability to love powerfully. ~ Edmond Manning

Only incorrigible bohemians find it boring or laughable when a man of talent outgrows the libertine chrysalis stage and begins to perceive and express the dignity of the intellect, adopting the courtly ways of a solitude replete with bitter suffering and inner battles though eventually gaining a position of power and honor among men. ~ Thomas Mann

The clown has great importance as part of the search for what is laughable and ridiculous in man. We should put the emphasis on the rediscovery of our own individual clown, the one that has grown-up within us and which society does not allow us to express. ~ Jacques Lecoq

When you grow up, who you were as a teenage either takes on a mythical importance or it's completely laughable. I wanted to be the kind of person who wiped those years away; instead, I feared, they defined me. ~ Julie Buntin

What's really interesting about that is that a lot of these words that were incendiary in their time now seem almost harmless and laughable, because they have this archaic quality. ~ Philip Kaufman

The only cure for vanity is laughter, and the only fault that is laughable is vanity. ~ Henri Bergson

And I felt happy inside these songs ( ... ) where sorrow is not lightness, laughter is not grimace, love is not laughable, and hatred is not timid, where people love with body and solu ( ... ), where they dance in joy ... ~ Milan Kundera

A good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more's the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for. ~ Herman Melville

His situation, insofar as he was a machine, was complex, tragic, and laughable. But the sacred part of him, his awareness, remained an unwavering band of light.
And this book is being written by a meat machine in cooperation with a machine made of metal and plastic. The plastic, incidentally, is a close relative of the gunk in Sugar Creek. And at the core of the writing meat machine is something sacred, which is an unwavering band of light.
At the core of each person who reads this book is a band of unwavering light.
My doorbell has just rung in my New York apartment. And I know what I will find when I open my front door: an unwavering band of light. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

I never expected to earn money out of writing. In fact, the idea of getting published was too bourgeois. Then, in England, I realised that writing a book was something you could do without it being laughable. ~ Romesh Gunesekera

As men neither fear nor respect what has been made contemptible, all honor to him who makes oppression laughable as well as detestable. Armies cannot protect it then; and walls which have remained impenetrable to cannon have fallen before a roar of laughter or a hiss of contempt. ~ Edwin Percy Whipple

If they truly loved you they won't devalue you. ~ Shannon L. Alder

That force - which the system tried to laugh at - when it finally broke through and the movement was recognized, the media said they were "just a bunch of spoiled kids, dope smokers [who] don't know what the hell they want." To demean it as something laughable - but that didn't work for very long. It's still an ongoing struggle; they're trying to find out how to fight. It's very exciting times. ~ Haskell Wexler

Lying contains the same hostile elements as a practical joke in that the 'victim' ends up looking foolish in his own eyes and laughable in everyone else's. ~ Sue Grafton

The worth of a child born and bred in Nigeria cannot be compared to that in the United States. ~ Yakubu Gowon

There is absolutely nothing surprising about a severely stigmatized group embracing their stigma. Psychologists have long observed that when people feel hopelessly stigmatized, a powerful coping strategy–often the only apparent route to self-esteem–is embracing one's stigmatized identity. Hence, 'black is beautiful' and 'gay pride'–slogans and anthems of the political movements aimed at ending not only legal discrimination, but the stigma that justified it. Indeed, the act of embracing one's stigma is never merely a psychological maneuver; it is a political act–an act of resistance and deviance in a society that seeks to demean a group based on an inalterable trait. As a gay activist once put it, 'Only by fully embracing the stigma itself can one neutralize the sting and make it laughable. ~ Michelle Alexander

I detest computers. If you had a device like that 30 years ago that froze up constantly, misbehaved constantly, lost your information and screwed up when you needed it the most, it would have been laughable. ~ Tom Scholz

When people express what is most important to them, it often comes out in cliches. That doesn't make them laughable; it's something tender about them. As though in struggling to reach what's most personal about them they could only come up with what's most public. ~ Terrence Malick

And really, wasn't this endless ruminating over my own likability in itself a thing only a woman would do? Did Bill - or Ted Cruz or Rand Paul - ever ponder their likability, or did they simply go after what they wanted? Did Bill ever stop to think about which of us was more qualified, did he question his own motives for entry into the race? The idea was laughable. ~ Curtis Sittenfeld

What is so often laughable, in the stories of Kundera's Czechoslovakia, is how grimly serious just about everything turns out to be, jokes and games and pleasure included; what's laughable is how terribly little there is to laugh at with any joy. ~ Philip Roth

To have people to the White House and worry about the price of things is laughable. ~ Letitia Baldrige

As long as you are not conscious of your self you can live; but if you become conscious of your self you fall from one grave into another. All your rebirths could ultimately make you sick. The Buddha therefore finally gave up on rebirth, for he had had enough of crawling through all human and animal forms. After all the rebirths you still remain the lion crawling on the earth, the Chameleon, a caricature, one prone to changing colors, a crawling shimmering lizard, but precisely not a lion, whose nature is related to the sun, who draws his power from within himself who does not crawl around in the protective colors of the environment, and who does not defend himself by going into hiding. I recognized the chameleon and no longer want to crawl on the earth and change colors and be reborn; instead I want to exist from my own force, like the sun which gives light and does not suck light.

That belongs to the earth. I recall my solar nature and would like to rush to my rising. But ruins stand in my way They say: 'With regard to men you should be this or that.' My chameleonesque skin shudders. They obtrude upon me and want to color me. But that should no longer be. Neither good nor evil shall be my masters. I push them aside, the laughable survivors, and go on my way again, which leads me to the East. The quarreling powers that for so long stood between me and myself lie behind me. ~ C.G. Jung

Imagine a room awash in gasoline, and there are two implacable enemies in that room. One of them has nine thousand matches. The other has seven thousand matches. Each of them is concerned about who's ahead, who's stronger. Well that's the kind of situation we are actually in. The amount of weapons that are available to the United States and the Soviet Union are so bloated, so grossly in excess of what's needed to dissuade the other, that if it weren't so tragic, it would be laughable. What is necessary is to reduce the matches and to clean up the gasoline. ~ Carl Sagan

God," said Benedict Fludd, "your God, that is, strides in and out of my life with no warning. One day he seems impossible - laughable, laughable - and the next, he is imperious." He stopped. He said "It is like the phases of the moon, maybe. Or the seasons of the sphere we live on, rolling in and out of the light, skeleton trees one day, and then snow, and afterwards the bright green veil and after that the full heat and shining. Only it is neither regular nor predictable. And there are - others - who stride in, when he takes himself off. Who seem persuasive. Like Hindoo demons who are gods in their own terms. ~ A.S. Byatt

That Newt Gingrich or any mainstream Republican has the nerve to look down from what they perceive as their moral mountaintop at anyone is laughable. ~ Henry Rollins

Men show their character in nothing more clearly than what they think laughable. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

One of the most egregiously stupid books I've ever come across. I would recommend reading this only because it's the epitome of all that is moronic, superficial, contrived, hollow, false and utterly laughable in publishing today. ~ Kris Saknussemm

Once it was the fashion to represent villages as places inhabited by laughable, livable simpletons, unspotted by the worldliness of city life, though occasionally shrewd in rural concerns. Later it was the popular thing to show villages as rotten with vice, and especially such sexual vice ... incest, sodomy, bestiality, sadism, and masochism were supposed to rage behind lace curtains and in the haylofts, while a rigid piety was professed in the streets. ~ Robertson Davies

Clever lies become matters of self-congratulation. Solemn pledges become a farce - laughable for their very solemnity. The Nation, with all its paraphernalia of power and prosperity, its flags and pious hymns, its blasphemous prayers in the churches, and the literary mock thunders of its patriotic bragging, cannot hide the fact that the Nation is the greatest evil for the Nation, that all its precautions are against it, and any new birth of its fellow in the world is always followed in its mind by the dread of a new peril. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

This is one of the most suspect things about the game form: A game with an involving story and poor gameplay cannot be considered a successful game, whereas a game with superb gameplay and a laughable story can see its spine bend from the weight of many accolades - and those who praise the latter game will not be wrong. ~ Tom Bissell

Asleep was the way Harry liked the Dursleys best; it wasn't as though they were ever any help to him awake. Uncle Vernon, Aunt Petunia, and Dudley were Harry's only living relatives. They were Muggles who hated and despised magic in any form, which meant that Harry was about as welcome in their house as dry rot. They had explained away Harry's long absences at Hogwarts over the last three years by telling everyone that he went to St. Brutus's Secure Center for Incurably Criminal Boys. They knew perfectly well that, as an underage wizard, Harry wasn't allowed to use magic outside Hogwarts, but they were still apt to blame him for anything that went wrong about the house. Harry had never been able to confide in them or tell them anything about his life in the Wizarding world. The very idea of going to them when they awoke, and telling them about his scar hurting him, and about his worries about Voldemort, was laughable. ~ J.K. Rowling

(About sweeping) ...
What he was in FACT doing was moving the dirt around with a broom, to give it a change of scenery and a chance to make new friends. ~ Terry Pratchett

Never has nostalgia held stronger sway; never has the belief in the redemptive possibilities of the future seemed so laughable. ~ Ann Marlowe

When you're young, you kind of take yourself seriously, and you think, like, "People need to see what I can do." And it's so laughable, especially with actors. ~ Will Arnett

I think it laughable, frankly, that the physics community comes up with a theory for everything. There isn't one theory for everything. There is not one explanation. We may eventually have several theories that can tie things together nicely but there is not a single theory of everything. ~ Edgar Mitchell

If she pleaded not guilty, David said she could suggest that the boy had been the agressor, or maybe it was all some teenage fantasy that went too far. Maybe the sex never really happened. Mary Kay saw that scenario as ridiculous. Almost laughable. She didn't think it would work. "I'm carrying his baby," she said.
Scratch that. ~ Gregg Olsen

Well!" said John Slater, after having acknowledged his nose and his likeness; "I could laugh at a jest as well as e'er the best on 'em, though it did tell agen mysel, if I were not clemming" (his eyes filled with tears; he was a poor, pinched, sharp-featured man, with a gentle and melancholy expression of countenance), "and if I could keep from thinking of them at home, as is clemming; but with their cries for food ringing in my ears, and making me afeard of going home, and wonder if I should hear 'em wailing out, if I lay cold and drowned at th' bottom o' th' canal, there - why, man, I cannot laugh at aught. It seems to make me sad that there is any as can make game on what they've never knowed; as can make such laughable pictures on men, whose very hearts within 'em are so raw and sore as ours were and are, God help us." John ~ Elizabeth Gaskell

I hear that there are plans afoot to produce a remake of Hans Christian Andersen's classic - 'The Emperor's New Clothes'. Who better to star in the leading role than recently defrocked Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson ? A narcissist with such naked ambition; an opportunist with such threadbare morals; a disgraced politician with such thinly veiled contempt for the British electorate, and judging by the sycophantic praise they heap on each other, arguably cut from the very same cloth as Donald Trump. Despite laughable pretensions of having the stature and fortitude of a modern day Churchill, he cuts a now lonely figure, a mere insignificant shadow. Boris, you can't hide anymore. Your warts and all are exposed for the whole world to see. ~ Alex Morritt

I founded this school for the masses. ~ Atiku Abubakar

In search," Urs (Hölzle) believed, "the discussion was really, How can we outdistance our current system and make it look laughable? That's the best definition of success: if a new system comes out and everyone says, 'Wow, I can't believe we put up with that old thing because it was so primitive and limited compared to this. ~ Douglas Edwards

You do that, buddy, and get back to me," Jonathon joked. I eyed the vampire and coven member. The love of my life and my friend. Could Jonathon and Isaac become friends? The idea was almost laughable. Almost.
"Oh, so we have pet names now do we," Isaac looked thoughtful for a moment, "If I'm buddy I think I'll call you buttercup. ~ Micalea Smeltzer

A kind of walking trance I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has often come upon me through repeating my own name to myself silently till, all at once, as it were, out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being; and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life.... ~ Alfred Tennyson

Darkness attracted him as much as light. He knew that these days turning out the light before making love was considered laughable, and so he always left a small lamp burning over the bed. At the momemnt he penetrated sabina, however, he closed his eyes. The pleasure suffusing his body called for darkness. The darkness was pure, perfect, thoughtless, vision less; that darkness was without end, without borders; that darkness was the infinite we each carry within us. ~ Milan Kundera

Men show their characters in nothing more clearly than in what they think laughable. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Almost overnight it became laughable to read writers like Cheever or Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about anally deflowering virgins in eighteenth-century France. The reason de Sade was preferable was that his shocking sex scenes weren't about sex but politics. They were therefore anti-imperialist, anti-bourgeois, anti-patriarchal, and anti-everything a smart young feminist should be against. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

There are certain battles that you pick. When they're not worth picking, they're laughable stories. ~ David Beckham

Some people have used this song as evidence that I worship the devil, which is another chapter for the big book of stupid. It's really just laughable. But the sad part is that it's not even remotely a song about devil worship! It's a song about the intersection of some basic human emotions, the place where sadness meets rage, where our need to mourn meets our lust for justice, where our faith meets our inclination to take matters into our own hands, like karmic vigilantes. People who hear the word Lucifer and start making accusations are just robbing themselves of an opportunity to get in touch with something deeper than that, something inside their own souls. ~ Jay-Z