Amusing Ourselves Quotes & Sayings

People don't talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolor left in the rain. To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response. If what we say is suitably apt and amusing, the listener will show his delight by emitting a series of uncontrolled high-pitched noises, accompanied by sharp intakes of breath of the sort normally associated with a seizure or heart failure. And by these means we converse. Talking, when you think about it, is a very strange business indeed. — Bill Bryson

People were kind and friendly and amusing, but they thought that companionship and conversation were synonymous, and some of them had voices that jarred in your head. There was a lot to be said for dogs. They understood without telling you so, and they were always pleasing to look at, awake or asleep, like Bingo. He slept now, with little whistling snores, in his basket at the side of the fire, his stubby legs and one whiskery eyebrow twitching to the fitful tempo of his dreams. — Monica Dickens

(Nix and Lothaire conversing)
"Have you no mate, female?" he'd asked, intrigued with her, though she was his natural enemy.

"I was betrothed to Loki for a time. Which did not proceed smoothly for obvious reasons. So for now I am an unrepentant manizer." At Lothaire's blank look, she'd said, "That will be amusing in the twenty-first century. — Kresley Cole

Medicine may be defined as the art or the science of keeping a patient quiet with frivolous reasons for his illness and amusing him with remedies good or bad until nature kills him or cures him. — Gilles Menage

The really destructive feature of their relationship is its inherent quality of boredom. It is quite natural for Peter often to feel bored with Otto - they have scarecely a single interest in common - but Peter, for sentimental reasons, will never admit that this is so. When Otto, who has no such motives for pretending, says, "It's so dull here!" I invariably see Peter wince and looked pained. Yet Otto is actually far less often bored than Peter himself; he finds Peter's company genuinely amusing, and is quite glad to be with him most of the day. Often, when Otto has been chattering rubbish for an hour without stopping, I can see that Peter really longs for him to be quiet and go away. But to admit this would be, in Peter's eyes, a total defeat, so he only laughs and rubs his hands, tacitly appealing to me to support him in his pretense of finding Otto inexhaustibly delightful and funny. — Christopher Isherwood

Current relationship status?" Her voice cut like an arctic chill blowing through the room.
"If you mean me, then you're not my type. If you mean my dad, he's single, but I don't think you're his type either," I said with a small smile. Mercy didn't find it amusing. A small blue vein in her forehead started throbbing like crazy ... "Actually, come to think of it, I don't think he has a type. I've never seen him with a woman.
Mercy, I hate to break it to you, but there's a very real possibility my dad is gay. — Jus Accardo

Falling in love and falling to your death feel about the same, I thought. And I almost laughed. — Shannon Hale

I don't believe in our politics, our way of thinking, believing, amusing ourselves; I don't share a single one of the ideals of our age. — Hermann Hesse

The Doctor was strapped to a wide table of some kind, and Turlough immediately started on the straps that held him.
"We must stop meeting like this."
"Very amusing," the Doctor replied with an irritated look. Sharma made quicker work of them with his issue knife.
"You're forgetting your manners." Turlough remembered their predicament.
"Thank me later," he suggested, and turned to leave. — David A. McIntee

I find it amusing on one level, poignant on another, when people try to get recognition from an outside source. It's sad. — Grace Slick

Mindfulness is a quality that's always there. It's an illusion that there's a meditation and post-meditation period, which I always find amusing, because you're either mindful or you're not. — Richard Gere

Ridicule, nominally amusing but really an expression of hostility, was the favourite weapon - the worst possible, short of actual cruelty, in dealing with young people. — Bertrand Russell

What's so incredibly amusing with photography is that while seemingly an art of the surface, it catches things I haven't even noticed. And it pains me not to have seen things in all their depth. — Jacques-Henri Lartigue

On the whole, and providing one is in good spirits and feeling reasonably bright, it is not hard to converse for a short space of time on subjects about which one knows little, and it is indeed often amusing to see how cunningly one can steer the conversational barque, hoisting and lowering her sails, tacking this way and that to avoid reefs, and finally racing feverishly for home with the outboard engine making a loud and cheerful noise. — Virginia Graham

We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate ... We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. — Henry David Thoreau

There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies. — Simone Weil

Some entertainers have tried to make art of coarseness, but in their public crudeness they have merely revealed their own vast senses of personal inferiority. When they heap mud upon themselves and allow their tongues to wag with vulgarity, they expose their belief that they are not worth loving and in fact are unlovable. When we as an audience indulge then in their profanity, we are like the audience at the Roman Colosseum being thrilled as the raging lions kill the unarmed Christians. We not only participate in the humiliation of the entertainers, but we are brought low by sharing in the obscenity. We need to have the courage to say obesity is not funny and vulgarity is not amusing. Insolent children and submissive parents are not the characters we want to admire and emulate. Flippancy and sarcasm are not qualities which we need to include in our daily conversations. — Maya Angelou

If the invention of derivatives was the financial world's modernist dawn, the current crisis is unsettlingly like the birth of postmodernism. For anyone who studied literature in college in the past few decades, there is a weird familiarity about the current crisis: value, in the realm of finance capital, parallels the elusive nature of meaning in deconstrucitonism. According to Jacques Derrida, the doyen of the school, meaning can never be precisely located; instead, it is always 'deferred,' moved elsewhere, located in other meanings, which refer and defer to other meanings - a snake permanently and necessarily eating its own tail. This process is fluid and constant, but at moments the perpetual process of deferral stalls and collapses in on itself. Derrida called this moment an 'aporia,' from a Greek term meaning 'impasse.' There is something both amusing and appalling about seeing his theories acted out in the world markets to such cataclysmic effect. — John Lanchester

How predictable, how perfectly average, how amusing. — Gillian Flynn

The purpose of bread and circuses is, as Neil Postman said in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, to distract, to divert emotional energy towards the absurd and the trivial and the spectacle while you are ruthlessly stripped of power. — Chris Hedges

Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death. — Neil Postman

When the years have all passed, there will gape the uncomfortable and unpredictable dark void of death, and into this I shall at last fall headlong, down and down and down, and the prospect of that fall, that uprooting, that rending apart of body and spirit, that taking off into so blank an unknown, drowns me in mortal fear and mortal grief. After all, life, for all its agonies of despair and loss and guilt, is exciting and beautiful, amusing and artful and endearing, full of liking and of love, at times a poem and a high adventure, at times noble and at times very gay; and whatever (if anything) is to come after it, we shall not have this life again. — Rose Macaulay

The elflocks of the crowd were every color of the rainbow, as was the light from their eyes that shone through the mask of the Arkadian winter night. Some of them had wings, but not gauzy gossamer tattooist fabulosities. The wing'd ones among them bore twin sails at their backs, reptilian bat bones folded and hooded just above their heads in taloned, Gothic arches of epidermis. — Edward Morris

True 'joy' is the difference between just amusing ourselves to death and creating 'meaningful' pleasure. — Sidney Poitier

He vividly recalled those old doubts and perplexities, and it seemed to him that it was no mere chance that he recalled them now. It struck him as strange and grotesque, that he should have stopped at the same spot as before, as though he actually imagined he could think the same thoughts, be interested in the same theories and pictures that had interested him ... so short a time ago. He felt it almost amusing, and yet it wrung his heart. ...It seemed to him, he had cut himself off from everyone and from everything at that moment. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

If you think that, then you, sir, are just as unacquainted with my sort of tenacity. I'd sooner let rats crawl out of my ass."

"Actually, maybe I'll stay," Enosh said. "That might prove amusing. — K.S. Villoso

Yes, word had gotten around about my amusing little defeathering trick (note: made the chicken naked). Apparently we couldn't just eat the poor thing and be done with it. Apparently we had to knit cunning lil' sweaters for it so it could squawk around the yard, feeling fancy. — Cate Tiernan

What I will say is that you have to exercise your writing muscle. Write every day. Get better at it. Read a lot of good books. As a professional writer, I force myself to write when I don't feel like it. I don't wait to feel inspired. It takes discipline and grit and sacrifice to be able to bring a book out to the world. It's so much work, and it's very difficult, but it is also the most fun I've ever had. I love making things up. I love amusing myself. — Melissa De La Cruz

I always try to keep in mind that while the characters in a farce may find themselves in outrageous dilemmas, and may behave in a way that the audience finds amusing, the characters themselves don't have the consolation of knowing they're in a comedy. — Rupert Holmes

At the logic of fashion, such once-popular perversions as pedophilia and sodomy will become derided cliches, as amusing as pottery ducks on suburban walls. — J.G. Ballard

Actually, there is no way of making vomiting courteous. You have to do the next best thing, which is to vomit in such a way that the story you tell about it later will be amusing. — P. J. O'Rourke

Some women
the good ones
are like a breath of fresh air, amusing and different and invigorating. The trouble is that it is damnably difficult to capture air and hold it for any length of time. — Karen Hawkins

I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further. — Richard Dawkins

I can say it, but it doesn't seem convincing to most people. I can call it an 'injustice,' but that doesn't always sink in either. You have to understand the nature of the culture in New York. Words that are equal to the pain of the poor are pretty easily discredited. A quarter of the truth, stated with lots of indirection, is regarded as more seemly.

Even when people do accept the idea of 'injustice,' there are ways to live with it without it causing you to change a great deal in your life. A mildly embarrassed toleration of injustice is an elemental part of cultural sophistication here. the stile is, 'Oh yes. We know all that. So tell us something new.' There's a kind of cultivated weariness in this. Talking about injustice, I am told, is 'tiresome' unless you do it in a way that sounds amusing. — Jonathan Kozol

Unconsciously, I fell in love with the small round sphere, with its amusing and capricious rebounds which sometimes play with me. — Fabien Barthez

The implication that there was something wrong with the war plan is amusing. — Donald Rumsfeld

Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself. — James Anthony Froude

Hey, you're not supposed to find our magnificent organs amusing. — Barbara Elsborg

It was amusing, in such lightness of air, that the Prince should again present himself only to speak for the Princess, so unfortunately unable again to leave home; and that Mrs Verver should as regularly figure as an embodied, a beautifully deprecating apology for her husband, who was all geniality and humility among his own treasures, but as to whom the legend had grown up that he couldn't bear, with the height of his standards and the tone of the company, in the way of sofas and cabinets, habitually kept by him, the irritation and depression to which promiscuous visiting, even at pompous houses, had been found to expose him. — Henry James

Other people say: hold on, if he's carrying the entire universe in a sack, right, that means he's carrying himself and the sack inside the sack, because the universe contains everything. Including him. And the sack, of course. Which contains him and the sack already. As it were.
To which the reply is: well? — Terry Pratchett

Certainty without power can be interesting, even amusing. Certainty with power can be dangerous. — Donald Rumsfeld

The last story you should write is the most important story. You should start with a story that is just an amusing, entertaining, fun story to write and learn your writing chops with the least important things before you start applying them to the most important things. — Chuck Palahniuk

That I was simply scaring sparrows at random and amusing myself by it. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

A man who has tasted with profound enjoyment the pleasure of agreeable society will eat with a greater appetite than he who rode horseback for two hours. An amusing lecture is as useful for health as the exercise of the body. — Immanuel Kant