Laughter

Doris Lessing:

Laughter is by definition healthy.

Francoise Sagan:

There can never be enough said of the virtues, the dangers, the power of a shared laugh.

Jessamyn West:

A good time for laughing is when you can.

Mary Pettibone Poole:

He who laughs, lasts!

Eva Hoffman:

Laughter is the lightning rod of play, the eroticism of conversation.

Agnes Repplier:

Laughter springs from the lawless part of our nature.

Caroline Llewellyn:

It’s possible to forgive someone a great deal if he makes you laugh.

Marlene Dietrich:

There comes a time when suddenly you realize that laughter is something you remember and that you were the one laughing.

Kate O’brien:

A laugh is a terrible weapon.

Kate Millet:

Hostility is expressed in a number of ways. One is laughter.

Agnes Repplier:

There is always a secret irritation about a laugh into which we cannot join.

Katherine Paterson:

It was the kind of laughter that caught like briars in her chest and felt very much like pain.

Elizabeth Hardwick:

The laughter of adults was always very different from the laughter of children. The former indicated a recognition of the familiar, but in children it came from the shock of the new.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu:

I have often observ’d the loudest Laughers to be the dullest Fellows in the Company.

Rosario Castellanos:

We have to laugh. Because laughter, we already know, is the first evidence of freedom.

Humor

Catherine Aird

If you can’t be a good example, then you’ll just have to be a horrible warning.

Sue Grafton

If high heels were so wonderful, men would still be wearing them.

Zsa Zsa Gabor

I vasn’t born to be an athlete; I vas born to be a lover!” “You vill see . . . It’s simple, darling!

Virginia Woolf:

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

Agnes Repplier:

Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals.

Dorothy Parker:

There’s a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; while wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

Emily Dickinson:

The truth I do not dare to know / I muffle with a jest.

George Eliot:

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

Kristin Hunter:

Humor and satire are more effective techniques for expressing social statements than direct comment.

Louise Bernikow:

Humor tells you where the trouble is.

Mary Hirsch:

Humor is a rubber sword – it allows you to make a point without drawing blood.

Colette:

Total absence of humor renders life impossible.

Mae West:

All discarded lovers should be given a second chance, but with somebody else.