Cackling Quotes & Sayings

Moral self-infatuation has its own corruptions, after all. With time, almost every other principle of the magazine acquired an ironic echo, a sort of cackling aftermath. — Renata Adler

Evil turned out not to be a grand thing. Not sneering Emperors with their world-conquering designs. Not cackling demons plotting in the darkness beyond the world. It was small men with their small acts and their small reasons. It was selfishness and carelessness and waste. It was bad luck, incompetence, and stupidity. It was violence divorced from conscience or consequence. It was high ideals, even, and low methods. — Joe Abercrombie

Hillary Clinton knew she wasn't gonna be indicted for whatever she's doing with the emails. You know how I know that? Because Jorge Ramos asked her in an interview. He said, "Would you step down if you were indicted?" And her reaction was (cackling), "What? Indicted? For what? What the heck? Are you serious? Oh, my God!" She said, "Silly! Ho-ho." There was no way it was gonna happen. — Rush Limbaugh

Heaven's heard us down here, cackling at our piss-takes and chortling at our quips; I've seen the looks, the suspicion that they're missing out on it, this laughing malarkey. But they always turn away, Gabriel to horn practice, Michael to the weights. Truth is they're timid. If there was a safe way down
a fire escape (boom-boom)
there'd be more than a handful of deserters tiptoeing down to my door. Abandon hope all ye who enter here, yes
but get ready for a rart ol' giggle, dearie. — Glen Duncan

An awful, heartbroken cackling from the reeds behind. A vortex formed. A hole in the water. Into this, tufts of feathers disappeared. Turning, Henry saw the fish inhale two ducklings. The others broke into the main river and were swept downstream, their mother with them. The thrashing fish threw water like a canoe blade. Gills flared as it wolfed them down. Henry looked about, frantic, but no one else was there to see, no one to assure him it was true. — Matthew Neill Null

Our northern summers, though, are versions Of southern winters, this is clear; And though we're loath to cast aspersions, They seem to go before they're here! The sky breathed autumn, turned and darkled; The friendly sun less often sparkled; The days grew short and as they sped, The wood with mournful murmur shed Its wondrous veil to stand uncovered; The fields all lay in misty peace; The caravan of cackling geese Turned south; and all around there hovered The sombre season near at hand; November marched across the land. — Alexander Pushkin

You know your marriage is in trouble when your wife would rather listen to a cackling drug lord than accept your apology. — Red Tash

I felt like onstage I have to have a certain amount of anonymity, like, personal anonymity, to feel loose and free. When you're up there with people who've known you for a decade, and you make a bad joke and you hear the cackling behind the drums, it's hard to get lost in the moment. — Jenny Lewis

AHA!" screamed a voice from overhead ... Peeves was hanging upside down from a chandelier and grinning maliciously at them.
"Potty asked Loony to go to the party! Potty lurves Loony! Potty luuuuurves Looooooony!"
And he zoomed away, cackling and shrieking, "Potty loves Loony! — J.K. Rowling

Oh, lord. I was beginning to think like Neith. Soon I'd be huddled in an underground bunker eating army rations and cackling as I sewed together the pockets of all the boys who'd jilted me. — Rick Riordan

So in that sense, I and my fellow horror writers are absorbing and defusing all your fears and anxieties and insecurities and taking them upon ourselves. We're sitting in the darkness beyond the flickering warmth of your fire, cackling into our caldrons and spitting out spider webs of words, all the time sucking the sickness from your minds and spewing it out into the night. — Stephen King

You seem to have found a stored pocket of energy."
"I am reborn!" Cackling, she whirled around, pushed off with her toes and leaped on him. "Let's have monkey sex," she said as she wrapped her legs around Roarke's waist.
"Well, if you insist. It so happens I have a pint of very nice chocolate sauce in the parlor."
"You're kidding."
"One never kids about monkey sex with chocolate sauce. — J.D. Robb

I'm definitely not your stereotypical actor: the loud, cackling type who strolls into a room and grabs everyone's attention with a great story. I've always been much more of a listener. — Emun Elliott

And to keep an eye too on anyone prone to a bit of cackling. — Terry Pratchett

On dope he sometimes thought that all the televisions on Calchalk Street were softly cackling about Richard Tull: news flashes about his most recent failures, panel discussions about his obscurity, his neglect. — Martin Amis

.. they look like they've escaped from a nursing home. Everywhere I turn I see puffy skin & radiant expressions, crinkles & pearls, broad smiles & high hair... Collectively they all lean forward, like bamboo in the wind. Their postures may be cruelled by age but their excitement is adolescent. Cackling & wheezing with laughter the elderly hordes squeeze into the waiting vans & shuffle about... — Tim Latham

Here in the forest lay sullen, soot-blackened stones that were the remains of ruined hearths; in abandoned cemeteries were dark headstones that had already half sunk into the ground. Everything inanimate - stones, iron - was being swallowed by the earth, dissolving into it with the years, while green, vegetable life, in contrast, was bursting up from the earth. The boy found the silence over the cold hearths especially painful. And when he came back home, the smell of smoke from the kitchen, the barking of dogs, and the cackling of hens somehow seemed all the sweeter. — Vasily Grossman

Her voice is thin and her moan is high,
And her cackling laugh or her barking cold
Bring terror to the young and old.
O Molly, Molly, Molly Means
Lean is the ghost of Molly Means. — Margaret Walker

Thus Betty scraped through a second bitter crisis, one that might have shattered a character more brittle. But she had grown sharp as bile from this, her latest shock, and each passing day increased her edge. Worse, there was no one now to notice her shrinking humanity and cry halt ... by turns she would become lightheaded, cackling away like one insane. It was the lightness of one who has nothing more to lose. — Eddie Lenihan

My phone is on my bed, whispering in my ear like a bottle of scotch to a recovering alcoholic, while the rain continues cackling at me through my window — Katja Millay

A witch didn't do things because they seemed a good idea at the time! That was practically cackling. You had to deal every day with people who were foolish and lazy and untruthful and downright unpleasant, and you could certainly end up thinking that the world would be considerably improved if you gave them a slap. But you didn't because, as Miss Tick had once explained:
a) it would make the world a better place for only a very short time;
b) it would then make the world a slightly worse place; and
c) you're not supposed to be as stupid as they are. — Terry Pratchett

The stable boy whose charge is this horse will receive fifty lashes for losing him," the old man said, cackling in delight as he gripped the reins.
"We will be back before dawn if your stories are true, Grandfather," Aladdin said, dislike for his partner growing. "And I will tip the poor boy as well. — Liz Braswell

I start every first draft with voice rather than theme or image or even character as such, so it isn't like I'm ever rubbing my hands, cackling, "The dad is really going to take it on the chin in this one!" Not in terms of any given story, and certainly not in terms of the collection as a whole. — Roy Kesey

PORTIA
So doth the greater glory dim the less:
A substitute shines brightly as a king
Unto the king be by, and then his state
Empties itself, as doth an inland brook
Into the main of waters. Music! hark!

NERISSA
It is your music, madam, of the house.

PORTIA
Nothing is good, I see, without respect:
Methinks it sounds much sweeter than by day.

NERISSA
Silence bestows that virtue on it, madam.

PORTIA
The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark,
When neither is attended, and I think
The nightingale, if she should sing by day,
When every goose is cackling, would be thought
No better a musician than the wren.
How many things by season season'd are
To their right praise and true perfection!
Peace, ho! the moon sleeps with Endymion
And would not be awaked.

- Acte V, Scene 1 — William Shakespeare

Do not fear those who bear you ill will, they soon shall fall in shame, read Georgina, cackling with mirth. — Leonora Carrington

She frowned at me. "You need some rest. You look like hell. And you're obviously tired enough to have gotten the giggles."
Wizards don't giggle," I said, hardly able to speak. "This is cackling. — Jim Butcher

I've fallen. I must have slipped. Hit my head on something. I think I'm going to be sick. Everything is red. I can't get up. One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl . . . Three for a girl. I'm stuck on three, I just can't get any further. My head is thick with sounds, my mouth thick with blood. Three for a girl. I can hear the magpies - they're laughing, mocking me, a raucous cackling. A tiding. Bad tidings. I can see them now, black against the sun. Not the birds, something else. Someone's coming. Someone is speaking to me. Now look. Now look what you made me do. — Paula Hawkins

I got used to birds: small black birds flying up from behind a building like God had tossed up a handful of currants, birds squalling in the parking lot of the grocery store (drowning the hum of industrial refrigerators), chachalacas -brown robed nuns to the spangled disco dancer peacocks - cackling in the dust of our yard. I got used to the chatters, squeaks, squalls, peeps, calls that sounded like bitter laughter, whistles, flutes, calls that sounded like souls ascending to heaven. I got used to dust and flatness, to sunsets like pink water pouring from the sky, flooding the earth with orange soda. I got used to wind: the hot, cruel wind of afternoon, the merciful magnolia breeze of night. I got used to it. But then I had to go. — Kathleen Founds

Now he laughs for real, cackling with the wicked innocence of the bright and easily bored. Staff Sergeant David Dime is a twenty-four-year-old college dropout from North Carolina who subscribes to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Maxim, Wired, Harper's, Fortune, and DicE Magazine, all of which he reads in addition to three or four books a week, mostly used textbooks on history and politics that his insanely hot sister sends from Chapel Hill. There are stories that he went to college on a golf scholarship, which he denies. That he was a star quarterback in high school, which he claims not to remember, though one day a football surfaced at FOB Viper, and Dime, caught up in the moment, perhaps, nostalgia triggering some long-dormant muscle memory, uncorked a sixty-yard spiral that sailed over Day's head into the base motor pool. — Ben Fountain

The crow signs as sweetly as the lark when no one's paying attention to them, and I think that if the nightingale sang during the day while all the geese were cackling, people would think it sounded no better than a wren. So many things are made perfect and as they should be by good timing! But quiet. Look how the moon won't be awakened. It must be sleeping with [Endymion — William Shakespeare

Outside the gates of the finca, watching the passing rows of tin-roofed shacks which represented the residential section of San Francisco de Paula, I began to think about The Old Man and the Sea, and I realized it was Ernest's counterattack against those who had assaulted him for Across the River. It was an absolutely perfect counterattack and I envisioned a row of snickering carpies bearing the likenesses of Dwight Macdonald and Louis Kronenberger and E.B. White, who in the midst of cackling, "Through! Washed Up! Kaput!" suddenly grab their groins and keel over. It is a rather elementary military axiom that he who attacks must anticipate the counterattack, but the critics, poor boys, would never make General Staff. As Ernest once said, "One battle doesn't make a campaign but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole goddamn war. — A. E. Hotchner

She is often the broken-winged one, who does everything all wrong until people realize she's been doing it ... pretty right all along. She's the poor girl who never dressed right, who had torn hose, and they were all baggy around her ankles. She's the Raggedy Ann of the sophisticated world, who pulls it out at the last minute, flies by the seat of her pants, cackling all the way home. She is the late bloomer, the late start, the autumn bush, the winter holly. She is Baubo, all the classical Greek goddesses. She is the old girl who still blushes, and laughs, and dances. She's the truth teller, maybe that people hate to hear, but they learn to listen to. She is not dumb and in some ways is not shrewd. She works on passion, and the doll in her pocket, and the intuition that leads her into and through all the world. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

I remember, around age ten, beholding the scene in The Shining in which the hot young woman whom Jack Nicholson is lewdly embracing in the haunted hotel bathroom ages rapidly in his arms, screeching from nubile chick to putrefying corpse within seconds. I understood that the scene was supposed to represent some kind of primal horror. This was The Shining, after all. But the image of that decaying, cackling crone, her arms outstretched in desire toward the man who is backing away, has stayed with me for three decades, as a type of friend. She's part baths-ghost, part mad-Naomi. She didn't get the memo about being beyond wanting or being wanted. Or perhaps she just means to scare the shit out of him, which she does. — Maggie Nelson

Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg; and when it takes to cackling will have nothing to announce but that addled delusion. — George Eliot

Are you going to ask me questions, Sheriff, or are you just going to sit there and think about how you're going to get into Doctor Graves' pants?"
"I can do both, Miss Pilcher," Jack said with a smile.
"I like you," she said, cackling. — Liliana Hart

I hear myself laughing, screeching, cackling. The world is red hot and pulsing. On fire [...] I stroll down the corridor and the flickering fluorescents celebrate my passing, humming in praise. I spin, bow and hum along. Bloody footprints trail; bloody fingers smear the walls. — Eliza Crewe

So familiar are eggs to us, however, that in the eighteenth century they were referred to as cackling farts, on the basis that chickens cackled all the time and eggs came out of the back of them. — Mark Forsyth

In school I ended up writing three different papers on "The Castaway" section of Moby-Dick, the chapter where the cabin boy Pip falls overboard and is driven mad by the empty immensity of what he finds himself floating in. And when I teach school now I always teach Crane's horrific "The Open Boat," and get all bent out of shape when the kids find the story dull or jaunty-adventurish: I want them to feel the same marrow-level dread of the oceanic I've always felt, the intuition of the sea as primordial nada, bottomless, depths inhabited by cackling tooth-studded things rising toward you at the rate a feather falls. — David Foster Wallace

How Adewen stuffed her braid in her mouth at that! Or she'd cover her mirth with her hands and shake till you'd think that the fit was upon her. She did the same too when she wept so you'd never be sure which she hid with her hands, her tears or her cackling. I think there were times she herself didn't know, nor does anyone know at times. Laugh till you weep. Weep till there's nothing left but to laugh at your weeping. In the end it's all one. — Frederick Buechner

Maybe we try too hard to be remembered, waking to the glowing yellow disc in ignorance, swearing that today will be the day, today we will make
something of our lives. what if we are so busy searching for worth that we miss the sapphire sky and cackling blackbird. what else is missing?
maybe our steps are too straight and our paths too narrow and not overlapping. maybe when they overlap someone in another country lights a candle, a couple
resolves their argument, a young man puts down his silver gun and walks away. — Naomi Shihab Nye

A storyteller makes us feel something. Makes us give a shit when we have no good reason to do so. Fun is not the last stop on the story train. The storyteller is master manipulator. The storyteller is cackling puppetmaster. — Chuck Wendig

Wisdom is a fox who, after long hunting, will at last cost you the pains to dig out; it is a cheese, which, by how much the richer, has the thicker, the homlier, and the coarser coat; and whereof to a judicious palate, the maggots are best. It is a sack posset, wherein the deeper you go, you'll find it the sweeter. Wisdom is a hen, whose cackling we must value and consider, because it is attended with an egg. But lastly, it is a nut, which, unless you choose with judgment, may cost you a tooth, and pay you with nothing but a worm. — Jonathan Swift

Stare at him," said Ghost. "They won't bite you if you keep staring at them."
Steve backed away. "They bite?"
Not really. They hiss at you, mostly. The only time geese are ever dangerous is when you happen to be standing on the edge of a cliff. I heard about a guy that almost got killed that way."
By geese?"
Yeah, there was a whole flock of them coming after him. All hissing and cackling and stabbing at his ankles with their big ol' beaks. He didn't know you had to stare them right in the eye, and he panicked. They backed him right over a fifty-foot cliff."
So how come he didn't die?"
This guy had wings," said Ghost. "He flew away. — Poppy Z. Brite

Although your world wonders me,
with your majestic and superior cackling hen
Your people I do not understand,
so to you I shall put an end
And you'll
never hear
surf music again — Jimi Hendrix

At least I fight my own battles, Alister,' Micah said.
'Really? And exactly why did you go cackling to the dean? — Cinda Williams Chima

Then he heard a wild, high-pitched cackling that made the hair stand up on the back of his neck. It wasn't sane, that laugh. In fact, it was the laughter of someone who never had more than a nodding acquaintance with sanity. — Mercedes Lackey

Beth gave birth to a baby girl, so much so that the first thing I thought of was Nessie, and then I couldn't stop cackling for like fifteen minutes. — Jennifer L. Armentrout