Everything Is Not A Joke Quotes & Sayings

My brother Billy was the joke teller. My brother Jim had a really sharp, cutting wit. And the teller of long stories, that was my brother Ed. As a child, I just absorbed everything they said, and I was always in competition for the laughs. — Stephen Colbert

If you think the worst you'll get the worst, but if you think the best ... "
"and then everything will blow up in your face anyway. Don't you get the punchline yet? Its the great cosmic practical joke: Knock knock, who's there? Big kick in the Ass. — Brad Meltzer

But no one wants to listen to our sad stories unless they are smoothed over with a joke or nice melody. And even then, not always. No one wants to hear a woman talking or writing about pain in a way that suggests that it doesn't end. Without a pat solution, silver lining, or happy ending we're just complainers -- downers who don't realize how good we actually have it.

Men's pain and existential angst are the stuff of myth and legends and narratives that shape everything we do, but women's pain is a backdrop- a plot development to push the story along for the real protagonists. Disrupting that story means we're needy or shellfish, or worst of all, man-haters - as if after all men have done to women over the ages the mere act of not liking them for it is most offensive. — Jessica Valenti

It is a good plan, with a young person of a character to be much affected by ludicrous and absurd representations, to show him plainly by examples that there is nothing which may not be thus represented. He will hardly need to be told that everything is not a mere joke. — Richard Whately

And she said it was a pity, because my father was so "keen", and what did I care about?
So I said, well, I was not quite sure, but on the whole I thought I liked having everything very tidy and calm all around me, and not being bothered to do things, and laughing at the kind of joke other people didn't think at all funny, and going for country walks, and not being asked to express opinions about things (like love, and isn't so-and-so peculiar?). So then she said, oh, well, didn't I think I could try to be a little less slack, because of Father, and I said no, I was I afraid I couldn't; and after that she left me alone. But all the others still said I was no good. — Stella Gibbons

The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days
Perhaps you will not miss them. That's the joke.
The universe winds down. That's how it's made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you'll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate. — John M. Ford

Everything about life is a joke. Don't you know that? — Kurt Vonnegut

It makes me feel tired about how guarded we are the whole time. Without even trying we're ready to make a joke of everything, serving up the day with big dollops of irony and derision and cynicism. As if. Sucked in. Kidding. — Fiona Wood

In those days, this was years for the sputnik thing, it was customary to downgrade the Russians' science. People who know something about those things didn't make that mistake. But at the level of Time magazine the joke was how they copied everything and claimed it for their own. Well, of course the corollary of that is that it's our bomb they have and that means we were betrayed. After the war our whole foreign policy depended on our having the bomb and the Soviets not having it. It was a terrible miscalculation. It militarized the world. And when they got it the only alternative to admitting our bankruptcy of leadership and national vision was to find conspiracies. It was one or the other. — E.L. Doctorow

I never could tell a joke. I just started talking to the audience, and when the drunks would yell, "Hey, when do the broads come on?" I got good at saying, "Relax. Clear your skin up first." They called me "the insult guy," but it's never mean-spirited. I'm just exaggerating everything about us and about life. — Don Rickles

A man is sufficiently condemned if it can only be shown that either in politics or religion he does not belong to some new school established within the last score of years. He may then regard himself as rubbish and expect to be carted away. A man is nothing now unless he has within him a full appreciation of the new era, an era in which it would seem that neither honesty nor truth is very desirable, but in which success is the only touchstone of merit. We must laugh at everything that is established. Let the joke be ever so bad, ever so untrue to the real principles of joking; nevertheless we must laugh - or else beware the cart. — Anthony Trollope

It's so easy to judge everybody and for some reason extra weight is the one thing everything feels OK to joke about. — Caroline Rhea

Sophie," he chastises. "You were looking down at my dick and laughing." "I didn't laugh," I correct him. "Fine, then you were smiling at him like the two of you were sharing some inside joke. Everything good between the two of you?" "Very much so," I confirm. — Kendall Ryan

There has to be irony, both in design and in the objects. I see around me a professional disease of taking everything too seriously. One of my secrets is to joke all the time — Achille Castiglioni

It's not about fear. It's about never feeling clean, spending years scrubbing your soul raw so you can eat without feeling nauseous, can look in the mirror and meet your own eyes when you put on makeup, brush your hair. To learn to be strong, to run your life and not be a victim of it, knowing in your heart that everything you've built is sitting on a foundation that can sink at any time. And you build it anyway, on faith alone that it won't be shattered, when everything in your life tells you that faith is a fucking joke, but you do it anyway. You do it anyway.( ... ) — Joey W. Hill

I know it's a guy who will talk to me, he wears his cockiness like an ironic T-shirt, but it fits him better. He is the kind of guy who carries himself like he gets laid a lot, a guy who likes women, a guy who would actually fuck me properly. I would like to be fucked properly! My dating life seems to rotate around three types of me: preppy Ivy Leaguers who believe they're characters in a Fitzgerald novel; slick Wall Streeters with money signs in their yes, their ears, their mouths; and sensitive smart-boys who are so self-aware that everything feels like a joke. — Gillian Flynn

Everything is changing. People are taking their comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke. — Will Rogers

Everything in life is not a joke."

"No, but it mostly is. — Allan Dare Pearce

Fundamentalists can't take a joke. Ever. They want us to blindly obey, parrot everything they do, and believe in their dogmas. — Shahin Najafi

Nora & Patch:
N:Is everything a joke to you?
P:Not everything.
N:Like what?
P:You. — Becca Fitzpatrick

Her eyes, though tired, had the glint of one who never stopped expecting to be amused, and her mouth turned up at the corners as if she'd just remembered a joke. It was the sort of face that drew strangers , that enchanted them and made them want to know her better. The way she had of making you feel, with a slight twitch of the jaw, that she had suffered as you did, that everything would be better now simply for having come within her orbit: that was her real beauty - her presence, her joy, her magnetism. That, and her splendid appetite for the make-believe. — Kate Morton

White men have screwed this country up! I would like a black, female ... . everything all rolled into one.I want something different. I want a real change. People, I want a president who speaks well, who has a sense of humor. This guy is such a moron! It's beyond the point where it's a joke. He's an idiot. — Denis Leary

Chance could share shit like that with his brother. Chance shared everything with his brother. To him, Quinn was some sort of superhero who occasionally got knee-walking drunk, told great stories, could crack a joke, and pissed him off from time to time. — Alex Morgan

Of course, once I'd wrapped my mind around the fact that it was Cal and not Archer standing in my bedroom, it dawned on me that Cal was standing in my bedroom.
"Hey," I breathed, hoping my hair wasn't a huge tangled mess, even though I was ninety-nine percent sure that it was. I mean, I could see it out of my peripheral vision.
"Hey."
"You're,um,in my room."
"I am."
"Is that allowed?"
"Well,we are engaged," Cal deadpanned.
I squinted at him, shoving big handfuls of my hair away from my face. I had no idea if that was supposed to be a joke or not. You could never tell with Cal.
"Did you want to watch me sleep or something? Because if that's the case, this engagement is so broken."
Cal's lips quirked in what might have been a smile. "Do you have a smart-ass reply for everything?
"If at all possible,yeah. — Rachel Hawkins

And then everything went on very quietly for a fortnight, says Dr. Jordan. He is reading aloud from my confession.
Yes Sir, it did, I say. More or less quietly.
What is everything? How did it go on?
I beg your pardon, Sir?
What did you do everyday?
Oh, the usual, Sir, I say. I performed my duties.
You will forgive me, says Dr. Jordan. Of what did those duties consist?
I look at him. He is wearing a yellow cravat with small white squares, he is not making a joke. He really does not know. Men such as him do not have to clean up the messes they make, but we have to clean up our own messes, and theirs into the bargain. In that way they are like children, they do not have to think ahead, or worry about the consequences of what they do. But it's not their fault, it is only how they are brought up. — Margaret Atwood

They all think any minute I'm going to commit suicide. What a joke. The truth of course is the exact opposite: suicide is the only thing that keeps me alive. Whenever everything else fails, all I have to do is consider suicide and in two seconds I'm as cheerful as a nitwit. But if I could not kill myself
ah then, I would. I can do without nembutal or murder mysteries but not without suicide. — Walker Percy

Everything that's created remains as it was before it was created. The artist fetches it down from the heavens as a finished thing. Eternity has no beginning. Poetry or a Joke: the act of creation lies between what's self-evident and what is permanent — Karl Kraus

Is everything a joke to you?" I asked. He dabbed his tongue to his lip again. "Not everything." "Like what?" "You. — Becca Fitzpatrick

You have to struggle a bit, hustle a little, and be willing to go bankrupt. Once you're willing to do that, everything opens up and you get the freedom. My joke is that next year, I'll make the first film that costs zero dollars. — Nick Nolte

when i was little i used to save my baths for later. id come back to them before bed and sit in the old cold bathwater and run cool water out of the shower and pretend i was hiding in vietnam and it was raining. i was young when i did this and am not sure why i was thinking about vietnam or what i knew about it. i did this when i was older too. im thinking about doing it again tonight.

you are running out of time to get everything you want exactly the way you want it. (this is a joke.) most things are going to be left unsaid. (this is not a joke.) a few weeks ago my mom sent me an email with pictures of eagles that said "how about these eagles." she visits my cousin in jail once a month. that seems like a lot for an aunt. he is in jail because he shot his girlfriend in the face but they are still together. she told me once that she knew in her heart that he is guilty but now she claims she never said that. — Heiko Julien

People take life as a gift even as a joke. But both cases it's not a gift - how everything is gave, the same moment it can be taken. One moment it's needed to do this and one moment you have. Still thinking it's a joke??
It's not really, Santa Clause is a killer, the guy who ruin everything was by Loverboy he is just kill the all biatches, but he was with Santa Clause they both worked together... (I think that the moment was taken, you don't have it. The Gift is gone, the joke was taken. Because you were wrong!) — Deyth Banger

Why wasn't I already kissing this woman? Why wasn't I naked, eating violets, and playing music underneath the open sky?
Looking around the room again, everything seemed terribly ridiculous. These people sitting on their benches wearing layers on layers of clothing, eating with knives and forks. It all struck me as so pointless and contrived. It was incredibly funny. It was like they were playing a game and didn't even realize it. It was like a joke I'd never understood before. — Patrick Rothfuss

Life seemed to be an educator's practical joke in which you spent the first half learning and the second half learning that everything you learned in the first half was wrong. — Russell Baker

Everything I say is a joke. I am a joke myself. — Karl Lagerfeld

We come from nothing, we go back into nothing.
That nothing is something, that something is everything.
That everything is the cosmos.
Is this a grand joke telling us? What we really are; just nothing. — Gian Kumar

He doesn't take anything seriously, and he has the work ethic of a ... a ... well, an indolent son of the privileged caste. I've worked my entire life, and I ... " "Take everything seriously?" Amaranthe suggested. Evrial crossed her arms. "Maybe. So, what? Life isn't a joke." "No, but it's easier to enjoy if you can find the humor in even the grim moments. Perhaps it'd be healthy for you to let someone bring a little levity into your life. — Lindsay Buroker

Everything you see comes from inside. People don't see it but inside the dressing room we laugh and joke a lot so it's not just for the cameras. It's the way things are off the pitch too. We are happy for each other, it is all natural. — Luis Suarez

The Danes don't take themselves seriously at all and look for the joke in everything. Us Scots are on the same line of latitude and have the same amount of light, which may be why we have a similar sense of humour. — Jamie Sives

But the problem is that you don't dare to think about anything. You're afraid; you don't know where your thoughts might lead you. Everything inside you is confused. You keep your eyes closed and stay on the old path. They brought you here, I don't know why and it doesn't concern me, but you won't accept my explanations of human guilt. You think it's a joke. Maybe it is, but maybe one could develop quite a nice philosophical idea out of it — Mesa Selimovic

You don't see yourself at all, do you? It seems to me that you're good at everything you try," said Ethan sincerely.
"I had a dream I could breathe underwater," I said flippantly, "Maybe I'll go swim with the mermaids."
Ethan turned to look at me with shock in his eyes.
"Just kidding," I said, alarmed at his reaction — Derrolyn Anderson

She doesn't think that the mean people she knows are the most passionate; they just want to laugh at everything. But then she remembers that she laughed when a boy in class played a joke on an ugly girl and made her cry. — Mary Gaitskill

What a grand joke the world was. You spend years fretting and plotting, only to find, in the end, that everything was going to be just fine, with or without you. — Jennifer Bernard

I don't even pretend to believe I know everything; I just believe in arguments God told me I had a pretty good chance of winning, while I was traveling through hell. — Shannon L. Alder

I did not survive everything. No one ever does. Little pieces of you - sometimes the best of you - get lost in a little lie here, a little joke there. And of course, the aftereffect is the tiny sob - unseen, unheard, deeply felt. — Carol Grace

Your ... Your aura. It's ... amazing. It's shining. I mean, it always shines, but today ... Well I've never seen anything like it. I didn't expect that after everything that happened.'
I shifted around uncomfortably. If I lit up around Dimitri normally, what on earth happened to my aura post-sex? — Richelle Mead

My characters still talk the way normal people talk. They argue, they are sarcastic with each other, they joke around. I usually end up with one outrageous minor character in each book that people just rave about. We all have that one friend who says and does things that are a riot. A character like that is the salt in the soup: you want just enough to bring everything to life. — Dan Alatorre

Cheers was one of the first shows where I paid attention to the writers because their [work] was better than everything else I was watching. The writers weren't afraid to let a joke fall slightly flat if it advanced the characters. — Shawn Ryan

George, you must realize that the world is a joke. There is no justice, everything is random. Only when you realize this will you understand how silly it is to take yourself seriously. There is no grand purpose in the universe. It just is. There's no particular meaning in what decision you make today about how to act. — Viktor E. Frankl

We've been dead for thousands and thousands of years. Dead or sleeping, depends on how you feel about it at any given moment. But that's okay. The trouble starts when you are born, then everything becomes taxing and temporary. When they pulled us into awareness, they killed us. Then we get saddled with a seven minute relay, at best. A soft limbo that's only palliative and comforting in theory. A momentary respite that's a cosmic joke of course and still resented by the divine. A petty haggling of which we weren't even a part of. When forced into an existence, we turned into the ward of all that breathes, subjected to the known universe, and though always partial to the unknown, which wasn't really found and never understood, is lost to us. — Asghar Abbas

He'd assumed that you went to school because you had to learn things, starting off with the easy stuff and moving on to the bigger issues, and once you'd learned them that was it, the way ahead opened up and thereafter life was simple and straightforward. What a joke. The older he got, the more complicated and obscure everything became. — Mary Lawson

If I just do everything the opposite of what my dad did, I think that will make things pretty easy. I can joke about it now because I'm past that stage where it used to hurt. By having a kid, it's gone. I could take all that negative energy that I had and put it in a positive way. — Derrick Rose

I always thought there was some cleverness to the joke diet in which you could eat as much as you want and as often as you want, but everything must be consumed naked in front of a full-length mirror. That would deter me! — Gene Weingarten

It might reasonably be maintained that the true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground. To be at last in such secure innocence that one can juggle with the universe and the stars, to be so good that one can treat everything as a joke - that may be, perhaps, the real end and final holiday of human souls. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

Once you realize what a joke everything is, being the Comedian is the only thing that makes sense. — Alan Moore

My friends joke that I love planning things - which I do - and the reason is because there's so much I want to do, so many things I want to see and experience. If I don't actively pursue these things, I will never do everything I want to do, in life and in my career. That's what gets me up in the morning. — Benjamin Stone

Science Fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story. In it, as in all fiction, there is room enough to keep even Man where he belongs, in his place in the scheme of things, there is time enough to gather plenty of wild oats and sow them, too, and sing to little Oom, and listen to Ool's joke, and watch newts, and still the story isn't over. Still there are seeds to be gathered and room in the bag of stars. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The world's a headmaster who works on your faults. I don't mean in a mystical or Jesus way. More how you'll keep tripping over a hidden step, over and over, till you finally understand: Watch out for that step! Everything that's wrong with us, if we're too selfish or too Yessir, Nosir, Three bags full sir or too anything, that's a hidden step. Either you suffer the consequences of not noticing your fault forever or, one day, you do notice it, and fix it. Joke is, once you get it into your brain about that hidden step and think, Hey, life isn't such a shithouse after all again, then BUMP! Down you go, a whole new flight of hidden steps.
There are always more. — David Mitchell

The whole Universe is a large joke. Everything in the Universe are just subdivisions of this joke. So why take anything too serious. — Frank Zappa

I think, in comedy, timing is everything. You and I could tell the same joke, but if one of our timing is off, it won't be as funny. You've gotta know when to deliver your punch-lines. — T.I.

In the two months I had also dated Justin Fellowes, this guy in my Spanish class, though after three weeks we decided we should "see other people," which in my case was a joke, but it beat hearing him remark on everything I ate. 'I don't know why girls are always on a diet,' he'd say when I ordered a Diet Coke, and 'You should watch your starch intake' when I had a muffin. — Deb Caletti

I went up on stage, and said, "Why did the chicken cross the road? To check out the chicks." I was a genius at 10. Try telling that at 21, and you look hacky and stupid. That was the only joke I've ever told. Everything since has been character voices, doing impressions or just telling stories. — Gabriel Iglesias

It [the memoir "In The Body of the World"] wrote me. I joke about it, but this book was so unusual. It just started to come out. I really feel like it came straight from my body. I think it was both an expression of what I had gone through, but also it just felt like everything had come together in my body and it needed to tell that story. — Eve Ensler

So although there is no phoenix here, there is, nonetheless, a fierce, stubborn, wildly insightful, arrogantly honest, crazily committed, and caring human, who will take the heat, the brunt of whatever silver spoon joke you may have, so I can help you have everything you want in your life. And I mean everything. — Lauren Handel Zander

You asked me if I want kids, and the answer is, that I want anything - everything - you want to give me. I want your mornings and your nights. I want your bickering and your eye rolls. I want your nudges when I'm hugging you too tight at night. I want your groans when I tell you a joke, and your moans when I'm making you feel good." "And what do I get?" I ask, my voice a hoarse whisper. "You get everything," he says. — Claire Contreras