Sustainability Humor Quotes

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A sense of humor is the best indicator that you will recover; it is often the best indicator that people will love you. Sustain that and you have hope.
Andrew Solomon (The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression)
Not that I haven't leaped up into the blinding light of competence now and then. It's sustaining the altitude that defeats me.
Lois McMaster Bujold (A Civil Campaign (Vorkosigan Saga, #12))
There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer's time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer's time isn't worth the paper he is not writing anything on.
E.B. White (One Man's Meat)
We assured Phelan that we were more than happy to let him have you and your menagerie,” Leo retorted. “After that, he said he needed to think.” “About what?” Beatrix demanded. “What is there to think about? Why is it taking him so long to make a decision?” “He’s a man, dear,” Amelia explained kindly. “Sustained thinking is very difficult for them.
Lisa Kleypas (Love in the Afternoon (The Hathaways, #5))
I can't make out what they're saying; it sounds like: hiss, blah, she hiss, squeak. But the aunt appears to speak the native language.
Emma Chase (Sustained (The Legal Briefs, #2))
Baz has stopped glaring at Penelope and started glaring at me. “What on earth are you drinking, Snow?” “A Unicorn Frappuccino.” He frowns. “Why’s it called that—does it taste like lavender?” “It tastes like strawberry Dip Dab,” I say. Penny’s grimacing at Baz. “For heaven’s snakes, Basil, I can’t believe you know what unicorns taste like.” “Shut up, Bunce, it was sustainably farmed.” “Unicorns can talk!” “They’re only capable of small talk; it’s not like eating a dolphin.” Baz takes my Frappuccino and sucks down a huge gulp. “Disgusting.” He hands it back to me. “Not like a unicorn at all.
Rainbow Rowell (Wayward Son (Simon Snow, #2))
I shall sustain a massive erection, that’s what, and I shan’t be answerable for the consequences. Some kind of ejaculation is almost bound to ensue and if either of you were to become pregnant I should never forgive myself.
Stephen Fry (The Liar)
If we are going to start calling industrial corn sustainable, then we might as well say that petroleum is a renewable resource if you're willing to wait long enough.
Catherine Friend (Compassionate Carnivore: Or, How to Keep Animals Happy, Save Old Macdonald's Farm, Reduce Your Hoofprint, and Still Eat Meat)
Oooh...Aunt Chelsea called Jake the D-word!" Rory's voice carries into the kitchen. "Dipshit?" "No." "Dumbass?" "No." "Douchebag?" "What's a douchebag?" "Rory!" Chelsea and I yell at exactly the same time.
Emma Chase (Sustained (The Legal Briefs, #2))
It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If you’d rather I didn’t stay—” I began. “I invited you.” “After sustaining a head injury. Which means you aren’t responsible for anything you said last night . . . except for the part where you forgave me for wrecking your car.” “You were run off the road.” “I still feel bad. It was a nice car.” I paused. “I’m also sorry about almost getting you killed.” “She says, as an afterthought.” “It was a really nice car.
Kelley Armstrong (Deceptions (Cainsville, #3))
Don’t let us take doubts with exaggerated seriousness nor let them grow out of proportion, or become black-and-white or fanatical about them. What we need to learn is how slowly to change our culturally conditioned and passionate involvement with doubt into a free, humorous, and compassionate one. This means giving doubts time, and giving ourselves time to find answers to our questions that are not merely intellectual or “philosophical,” but living and real and genuine and workable. Doubts cannot resolve themselves immediately; but if we are patient a space can be created within us, in which doubts can be carefully and objectively examined, unraveled, dissolved, and healed. What we lack, especially in this culture, is the right undistracted and richly spacious environment of the mind, which can only be created through sustained meditation practice, and in which insights can be given the change slowly to mature and ripen. 129-130
Sogyal Rinpoche (The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying)
She returned to him, pressed his cheeks in her hands. "My eccentric old man, thinking you could fly." "This time, only my words will fly," he said solemnly. They both cracked up. Almost twenty years together and if blazing heat had turned to warmth, humor, it was less wild but easier to sustain.
Lauren Groff (Fates and Furies)
There are people who bring joy to our lives, but who fail to make us happy. They are the people for the moment. Never rely on their love because it is not sustainable. Their love is alike a comet that illuminates the sky, but then fades away because it lacks the sustainable energy of the sun.
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
Never underestimate the power of cookies.
Marisa Baggett (Sushi Secrets: Easy Recipes for the Home Cook. Prepare delicious sushi at home using sustainable local ingredients!)
After a long chilly night's drive, straining our eyes in the darkness for unseen obstacles and pitfalls, we found that there was a lot to be said for a dram of whisky stirred into our porridge. It made a sustaining and stimulating mixture which I can warmly recommend as a breakfast dish to all engaged on similar enterprises.
Fitzroy Maclean (Eastern Approaches)
Please take note that any and all dragon petting will be at your own peril. We are not liable for any injuries sustained while petting.
Love The Stacks Bookstore
Humor relieves the tension between what we see or desire but repress in order to sustain a survivable illusion about the world we live in. As such it's always potent stuff, and dangerous.
Lynda Williams
I let his voice be my comfort. It bore no trace of pain or self-pity, carrying only good humor and softness and just the tiniest hint of jazz. I lived on it as if it were oxygen. It was sustaining, and it was always enough.
Michelle Obama (Becoming)
No one will improve his health significantly without accurately perceiving priorities, knowing clearly what is at stake if those are not attended to and what is to be gained if acted on correctly. That’s the basic homework before any change can come about. Then that knowledge has to be transformed into a sustainable motivation.
Darrell Calkins (Re:)
It is in the best interest of the rich to preserve poverty.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
For Arthur, who could usually contrive to feel self-conscious if left alone for long enough with a Swiss cheese plant, the moment was one of sustained revelation.
Douglas Adams (The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #1-5))
Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy
W.B. Yeats
Within environments capable of sustaining humans, there are constant tsunamis, volcanoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, mudslides, poisonous mushrooms, and lawyers, all of which make human life painfully fragile.
Noson S. Yanofsky (The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us)
It isn't easy being an organism. In the whole universe, as far as we know, there is only one place, an inconspicuous outpost of the Milky Way called Earth, that will sustain you, and even it can be pretty grudging.
Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
Our guiding principles are simple: Do as little harm to others as you can; make any sacrifice for your true friends; be responsible for yourself and ask nothing of others; and grab all the fun you can. Don’t give much thought to yesterday, don’t worry about tomorrow, live in the moment, and trust that your existence has meaning even when the world seems to be all blind chance and chaos. When life lands a hammer blow in your face, do your best to respond to the hammer as if it had been a cream pie. Sometimes black humor is the only kind we can summon, but even dark laughter can sustain.
Dean Koontz (Seize The Night (Moonlight Bay, #2))
The sight of little Flask mounted upon gigantic Daggoo was yet more curious, for sustaining himself with a cool, indifferent, easy, unthought of, barbaric majesty, the noble negro to every roll of the sea harmoniously rolled his fine form. On his broad back, flaxen-haired Flask seemed a snow-flake. The bearer looked nobler than the rider.
Herman Melville (Moby-Dick or, The Whale)
She lives in a town of sorry history, indifferent to ethical perspectives, apathetic to female attributes, cargo and trunk liners, spilled oil in the garage, telephone poles shaped like liquor bottles, sustaining burly weather, cardiac distressing cold, tobacco and mortality, lying face-up on the bar’s concrete floor, no one can waste a life faster than a Montana redneck.
Brian D'Ambrosio (Fresh Oil and Loose Gravel: Road Poetry by Brian D'Ambrosio 1998-2008)
That’s how Hunter law works. Max was my maker, so his stuff is my stuff.” Daniel smirked. “I’m your maker, so my stuff is your stuff. It’s my obligation to sustain you. Kinda like a parent.” “Eww! Don’t say that!” “The phrase ‘Who’s your daddy?’ suddenly gets a new meaning, no?” “Stop it! Do you want to put me off you for good?” Okay, she shouldn’t have said that. Please, please, please tell me you didn’t hear that. “Why? Are you on me?
Stefanie J. Pristavu
There’s no winning or losing in this game, only playing, endless playing, you want your adversary to be strong not weak, smart not dumb, you’re delighted to trick him and delighted to be tricked by him, boy learns from girl, white learns from black, old learns from young, the teaching is the doing is the beauty is the grace is the humor, endlessly you go on learning, smiling, moving, feinting, never missing a beat. Gingare, the dance of life: the controlled, prolonged, sustained, ineffable excitement of capoeira is like an endless climax.
Nancy Huston (Black Dance)
Strike missed the absence of an overriding objective, in pursuit of which he could shelve his sadness; missed the imperative to dismiss pain and distress in the service of something greater, which had sustained him in the military. None of his old coping strategies were admissible in Joan’s kitchen, beside the flowered casserole dishes and her old oven gloves. Dark humor and stoicism would be considered unfeeling by the kindly neighbors who wanted him to share and show his pain. Craving diversionary action, Strike was instead expected to provide small talk and homely acts of consideration.
Robert Galbraith (Troubled Blood (Cormoran Strike, #5))
Future historians, I hope, will consider the American fast food industry a relic of the twentieth century — a set of attitudes, systems, and beliefs that emerged from postwar southern California, that embodied its limitless faith in technology, that quickly spread across the globe, flourished briefly, and then receded, once its true costs became clear and its thinking became obsolete. We cannot ignore the meaning of mad cow. It is one more warning about unintended consequences, about human arrogance and the blind worship of science.The same mindset that would add 4-methylacetophenone and solvent to your milkshake would also feed pigs to cows. Whatever replaces the fast food industry should be regional, diverse, authentic, unpredictable, sustainable, profitable — and humble. It should know its limits. People can be fed without being fattened or deceived.This new century may bring an impatience with conformity, a refusal to be kept in the dark, less greed, more compassion, less speed, more common sense, a sense of humor about brand essences and loyalties, a view of food as more than just fuel.Things don’t have to be the way they are. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I remain optimistic.
Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal)
The eye contact is strong and he’s biting his lip when he’s chatting to me, so I know he’s feeling me. But then I check his accounts: minus four hundred pounds in his current, six grand in debt on his credit card. Queenie, I just bid him a good day and let him pass— I stopped hacking at the thick string holding the weave in place. “But this could have been ‘the one’, Kyazike. What if you fell in love? You could have financially guided hi—” “Financially guides who? Excuse me, Queenie, I cannot be with someone in that much debt. I have a lifestyle that needs sustaining. My Mr. Right cannot have minus money.
Candice Carty-Williams (Queenie)
What else draws man to a woman than his desire to access her persona specifics; and once drawn, won’t she bare her veiled assets for her fancied man to dabble with her private accounts? But then, after a few of his jaunts to her favoured joint, what else would be left in her for her lover to explore and for her to offer? Thus, thereafter, how could she cater to his need for variety and what else she could conjure up to sustain her enticement? Oh, the poor thing, seeing his interest in her wane, won’t she turn more so eager to keep him in good humor? But then, the more she gives him; even more she satiates him, and its only time before she finds her paramour bypass her favours for lesser flavours.
B.S. Murthy (Benign Flame: Saga of Love)
Egocentrism is the problem, then, not Egos. Egocentric people are agents for themselves only (and perhaps also for their immediate families), without awareness of or tending of the social and natural environments that sustain their lives. Their consciousness is Ego-centered. A person with a healthy, mature Ego, in contrast, is ecocentric; she understands herself as, first and foremost, an agent for (the health of) her ecosystem (and second, as an agent for the health of her human community, which dwells within that ecosystem; and third, as an agent for her immediate family and self). Spiritual practice helps mature our Egos. Faced with the assertion that the goal of spiritual practice is to eliminate the Ego, the East facet of the Self might respond with a hearty laugh and the blended perspectives of the Trickster, Fool, and Sage, as, for example, expressed by Jay Leeming: Trying to get rid of your ego Is like trying to get rid of your garbage can. No one believes you are serious. The more you shout at the garbage man The more your neighbors remember your name.6 Rather than attempting to jettison the Ego, a sensible person draws on the resources of her East Self to cultivate her relationship to innocence, wisdom, humor, and the great, transpersonal, and universal mysteries of life.
Bill Plotkin (Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche)
We think of ourselves as fun-loving, and of God as a humorless killjoy. But we’ve got it backward. It’s not God who’s boring; it’s us. Did we invent wit, humor, and laughter? No. God did. We’ll never begin to exhaust God’s sense of humor and his love for adventure. The real question is this: How could God not be bored with us? Most of us can envision ourselves being happy for a few days or a week, if that. But a year of complete and sustained happiness? Impossible, we think, because we’ve never experienced it. We think of life under the Curse as normal because that’s all we’ve ever known. A hundred or a million years of happiness is inconceivable to us. Just as creatures who live in a flat land can’t conceive of three-dimensional space, we can’t conceive of unending happiness. Because that level of happiness is not possible here on the fallen Earth, we assume it won’t be possible on the New Earth. But we’re wrong. To properly envision Heaven, we must remove from our eyes the distorted lenses of death and the Curse.
Randy Alcorn (Heaven: A Comprehensive Guide to Everything the Bible Says About Our Eternal Home)
Farewell, Aragog, king of the arachnids, whose long and faithful friendship those who knew you would never forget! Though your body will decay, your spirit lingers on in the quiet, web-spun places of your forest home. May your many-eyed descendants ever flourish and your human friends find solace for the loss they have sustained.
J.K. Rowling
In this short period of my life so far, I have at least found that euphoria knows nothing about maths. And, when the time comes, we all kill our mockingbird to sustain the maths, as it's essential for our survival on this earth. What a hoax, I mean brilliant one?
Rohit Shukla
Livia’s song flows from my lips easily. I have known her since she was a baby. I held her, cuddled her, loved her. I sing of her strength. I sing of the sweetness and humor that I know still live within her, despite the horrors she has endured. I feel her body strengthening, her blood regenerating. But as I knit her back together, something is not right. I move down from her heart to her belly. My consciousness flinches back. The baby. He—and my sister is right, it is a he—sleeps now. But there is something wrong with him. His heartbeat, which instinct tells me should sound like the gentle, swift thud of a bird’s wings, is too slow. His still-developing mind too sluggish. He slips away from us. Skies, what is the child’s song? I do not know him. I know nothing about him except that he is part Marcus and part Livia and that he is our only chance for a unified Empire. “What do you want him to be?” the Nightbringer asks. At his voice, I jump, so deep in healing that I forgot he was here. “A warrior? A leader? A diplomat? His ruh, his spirit, is within, but it is not yet formed. If you wish him to live, then you must shape him from what is there—his blood, his family. But know that in doing so, you will be bound to him and his purpose forever. You will never be able to extricate yourself.” “He is family,” I whisper. “My nephew. I wouldn’t want to extricate myself from him.” I hum, searching for his song. Do I want him to be like me? Like Elias? Certainly not like Marcus. I want him to be an Aquilla. And I want him to be a Martial. So I sing my sister Livia into him—her kindness and laughter. I sing him my father’s conviction and prudence. My mother’s thoughtfulness and intelligence. I sing him Hannah’s fire. Of his father, I sing only one thing: his strength and skill in battle—one quick word, sharp and strong and clear—Marcus if the world had not ruined him. If he had not allowed himself to be ruined. But there is something missing. I feel it. This child will one day be Emperor. He needs something deeply rooted, something that will sustain him when nothing else will: a love of his people. The thought appears in my head as if it’s been planted there. So I sing him my own love, the love I learned in the streets of Navium, in fighting for my people, in them fighting for me. The love I learned in the infirmary, healing children and telling them not to fear. His heart begins to beat in time again; his body strengthens. I feel him give my sister an almighty kick, and, relieved, I withdraw.
Sabaa Tahir (A Reaper at the Gates (An Ember in the Ashes, #3))
Readers are invited to decide for themselves the relative truth of the Native American mysticism that pervades the Walt Longmire novels. What’s never in doubt is Walt Longmire’s tenacity, keen awareness and quick thinking, lively sense of humor, and steadfast adherence to a set of values that sustains him in the face of even the gravest peril. Walt understands how even the most deranged and violent of people think and feel and act. To watch him in action—and to listen to him narrate his own story—is one of the many pleasures of the Walt Longmire mysteries.
Craig Johnson (Hell Is Empty (Walt Longmire, #7))
I promise to love and cherish you, to honor and sustain you, in sickness and in health, in poverty and in wealth, in the bad that may darken our days, in the good that may light our way. Tirzah, beloved, I promise to be true to you in all things until I die. And even beyond that, God willing.” She stood staring at him, shaken to the core. “And what have I to promise you?” His eyes lit with gentle humor. “To obey?” He lowered his mouth to hers. When he kissed her, Angel was lost in a wilderness of new sensations. It had never felt like this, warm and wonderful, exciting and right. None of the old rules applied. She forgot everything she had ever learned from other masters. She was dry ground soaking in a spring rain, a flower bud opening to the sun. Michael knew and gently coaxed her with tender words flowing over her like the sweet balm of Gilead healing her wounds. And she flew, Michael with her, into the heavens.
Francine Rivers (Redeeming Love)
Sustain a positive outlook. Cultivate a can-do spirit, and you will be an inspiration to employees. And, when that's a tall order, fake it until you make it! • Be known as a fair person. Employees want to be treated fairly, and you must take the necessary steps to make sure they feel that is the case. • Keep an eye on morale. Morale at the workplace can be affected positively or negatively by an incident that, although it might seem insignificant to you, might be very important to your employees. A contented group of employees will do more and better work than an unhappy group. • Set an example. If you want your employees to work hard and succeed, then set an example by doing so yourself. Be a spectacular role model! • Take responsibility for your actions. If something goes wrong and it's your fault, step up to the plate and acknowledge whatever it is that went wrong and why. • Maintain your sense of humor. Don't take yourself too seriously, and don't be in such a hurry that you haven't got time to tell or listen to a positive (tasteful) story. Studies suggest laughter and good humor go a long way in helping employees function well in the workplace. • Acknowledge good work through praise. Everyone wants to hear “well done” now and then, so make sure you acknowledge good work. Say it privately and say it within earshot of others, too. • Give credit for ideas. If one of your employees comes up with a great idea, by all means give that person the credit he or she deserves. Don't allow anyone to take an employee's idea and pass it off as his own. (Managers are sometimes accused of stealing an employee's idea; be scrupulous about avoiding even a hint of such a thing.) Beyond the basic guidelines listed above, a good manager must possess other positive qualities: • Understanding: Conventional wisdom dictates that you walk in someone else's shoes before you judge her. Keep that in mind when dealing with people in the workplace. • Good communication skills: Keep your communication skills in good working order. You might want to join speaking organizations to learn how to be a better public speaker. But don't stop there. You communicate when you send a memo, write e-mail, and lead a meeting. There's no such thing as being a “perfect” communicator. An excellent manager will view the pursuit of this art as a work in progress. • Strong listening skills: When was the last time you really listened to someone when he was talking to you? Did you give him your full, undivided attention, or was your mind thinking about five other different things? And when you are listening, do you really know what it is people are trying to tell you? (You might have to ask probing questions in order to get the message.) • Leadership: Employees need good leaders to help guide them, so make sure your leadership skills are enviable and on-duty. • Common sense: You'll need more than your fair share if you expect to be a good manager of people. Some managers toss common sense out the window and then foolishly wonder what happened when things go wrong. • Honesty: Be honest and ethical in all of your business dealings — period! • A desire to encourage: Encouragement is different than praise. Encouragement helps someone who hasn't yet achieved the goal. Employees need your input and encouragement from time to time in order to be successful, so be prepared to fill that role.
Marilyn Pincus (Managing Difficult People: A Survival Guide For Handling Any Employee)
My dad doesn't have an iota of the depressive in him. He just depresses other people. Nothing brings him down. But this can't be true. I think it just comes out when absolutely no one else is around. It always seemed that while I knew he loved us a lot, my father actually needed nothing to be happy except books. There was enough in literature to challenge, entertain, amuse and inspire a man for a lifetime. Books and music were simply enough to sustain anyone was what he radiated. Humor, love, tragedy, it was all contained therein. And if all he needed was books, then he probably wouldn't mind if he lost the house and the wife and the whole life. Because the story was more important than the family. The story being that he was going to write the Great American Novel and finally be important, and in being important, he would be loved. Willing to lose his family to be loved by his family. Oh, the tragic blunder of this. It could almost drive someone mad. Wait, it did drive someone mad.
Jeanne Darst (Fiction Ruined My Family: A Memoir)
By definition, fifty percent of every large group that let's anyone join is below average.
Jack J. Lee (Year of the Dead (Sustainable Earth #1))
Twitter has the sustained ability to not get all touchy when I forget to “favorite” and thus had me at the first entirely inappropriate tweet flung my way.
Jennifer Harrison (Write like no one is reading 2)
Humour sustains us during failure; more so after success, when we're prone to fail that much more, daring abyss, pumped up with success.
Fakeer Ishavardas
Are you going to eat that?” she inquired, indicating the food on the desk. Liz shook her head. “Then I must,” she declared, with a grotesque attempt at reluctance. “They have given you a potato. You must have a lover in the kitchen.” The humor of this observation sustained her until she had finished the last of Liz’s meal.
John Le Carré (The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (George Smiley, #3))
We've eaten, but he looks hungry, and experience tells me that crazy takes a lot of calories to sustain.
Emil Ostrovski (The Paradox of Vertical Flight)
Stress is the effort to sustain the illusion of being in control.
Danielle Light
We need to find you an outlet that’s going to be healthy and sustainable.” ​I consider these words for a moment. “Like what?” I finally ask, coming up with nothing. ​“Well, you could write,” the bigfoot therapist suggests. “Something creative is a great way to let that illogical side of you come out and play.” ​“Knowing my hyperfocus I’d probably just end up writing hundreds of books expressing every corner of my personality in a deeply intricate catalog of feelings,” I offer with a scoff. ​My therapist doesn’t seem phased.
Chuck Tingle (Not Pounded By The Physical Manifestation Of Someone Else's Doubt In My Place On The Autism Spectrum Because Denying Someone's Personal Journey And Identity Like That Is Incredibly Rude So No Thanks)
Raven seems very nice, even if she’s married to another wild man like you.” She probably has lousy taste, just like me. She tacked the thought on deliberately. “What does that mean?” He tried to sound indignant, to keep her talking, to help her sustain her sense of humor. Jacques appreciated her courage and her unfailing determination to keep up her end, no matter how difficult it was on her. “It means she can’t have much sense.
Christine Feehan (Dark Desire (Dark, #2))
When that grenade blew me over the cliff, it probably should have killed me, but the only new injury I had sustained was a broken nose, which I got when I hit the deck semiconscious. To be honest, it hurt like hell, along with my back, and I was bleeding all over my gear. However, I had not been seriously shot, as two of my team had. Axe was holding the tribesmen off, leaning calmly on a rock, firing up the hill, the very picture of an elite warrior in combat. No panic, rock steady, firing accurately, conserving his ammunition, missing nothing. I was close to him in a similar stance, and we were both hitting them pretty good. One guy suddenly jumped up from nowhere a little above us, and I shot him dead, about thirty yards range. But we were trapped again. There were still around eighty of these maniacs coming down at us, and that’s a heck of a lot of enemies. I’m not sure what their casualty rate was, because both Mikey and I estimated Sharmak had thrown 140 men minimum into this fight. Whatever, they were still there, and I was not sure how long Danny could keep going. Mikey worked his way alongside me and said with vintage Murphy humor, “Man, this really sucks.” I turned to face him and told him, “We’re gonna fucking die out here — if we’re not careful.” “I know,” he replied. And the battle raged on. The massed, wild gunfire of a very determined enemy against our more accurate, better-trained response, superior concentration, and war-fighting know-how. Once more, hundreds of bullets were ricocheting around our rocky surroundings. And once more, the Taliban went to the grenades, blasting the terrain around us to pieces. Jammed between rocks, we kept firing, but Danny was in all kinds of trouble, and I was afraid he might lose consciousness.
Marcus Luttrell (Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10)
What do you think of Raven?” “I thought we had to be quiet.” Shea was looking in every direction for bats. “The bats know we are here, Shea, but there is no need to fear them. I will keep them away from you.” He spoke calmly as if it was an everyday occurrence to control the movements of bats. His fingers curled around the nape of her neck as much in reassurance as to prevent her from fleeing. His thumb caressed her satin skin, found her pounding pulse, and stroked gently, soothingly. “Raven seems very nice, even if she’s married to another wild man like you.” She probably has lousy taste, just like me. She tacked the thought on deliberately. “What does that mean?” He tried to sound indignant, to keep her talking, to help her sustain her sense of humor. Jacques appreciated her courage and her unfailing determination to keep up her end, no matter how difficult it was on her. “It means she can’t have much sense. That man is dangerous, Jacques, even if he is your brother. And the healer is positively scary.” “Did you think so?” “Didn’t you? He smiled and talked so gently and calmly, but did you ever look into his eyes? It’s evident he feels no emotion whatsoever.
Christine Feehan (Dark Desire (Dark, #2))
Patrick was a hard-bitten man who did not find his life's purpose till his life was half over. he had a temper that could flare dangerously when he perceived an injustice - not against himself but against one another, particularly against someone defenseless. But he had the cheerfulness and good humor that humble people often have. He enjoyed this world and its variety of human beings - and he didn't take himself too seriously. he was, in spirit, and Irishman. 'Supreme egotism and utter seriousness are necessary for the greatest accomplishment, and these the Irish find hard to sustain; at some point, the instinct to see life in a comic light becomes irresistible, and ambition falls before it.' (quoting Willam V. Shannon)
Thomas Cahill (How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe)
I once heard that laughter was the most direct line between any two people, and certainly the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop used humor to break down the social barriers that separate us. Humor like humility, comes from the same root word for humanity: humus. The lowly sustaining earth is the source for all three words. Is it any surprise that we have to have sense of humility to be able to laugh at ourselves and that to laugh at ourselves reminds us of our shared humanity?
Dalai Lama XIV (The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World)