Selected absurdity quotes

1. What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.

2. At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

3. Vampires pretending to be humans pretending to be vampires ... How avant-garde!

4. The task I've been given seems absurd: To wait here on earth until I no longer exist.

5. Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it.

6. Bear in mind the simple rule, X squared to the power of two minus five over the seven point eight three times nineteen is approximately equal to the cube root of MCC squared divided by X minus a quarter of a third percent. Keep that in mind, and you can't go very far wrong.

7. The Minister of Transport issued this appeal to motorists: Can anyone give him a lift to Leicester?

8. Why would anyone steal a shopping cart? It's like stealing a two-year-old.

9. Have you ever tried to split sawdust?

10. As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

11. Everything is worth precisely as much as a belch, the difference being that a belch is more satisfying.

12. We thought being offered the M.B.E. [Member of the Order of the British Empire] was as funny as everybody else thought it was. Why? What for? We didn't believe it. It was a part we didn't want. We all met and agreed it was daft.

13. The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.

14. The trouble with super heroes is what to do between phone booths.

15. I haven't slept for ten days, because that would be too long.

16. I remember the time I was kidnapped and they sent a piece of my finger to my father. He said he wanted more proof.

17. The earth makes a sound as of sighs and the last drops fall from the emptied cloudless sky. A small boy, stretching out his hands and looking up at the blue sky, asked his mother how such a thing was possible. Fuck off, she said.

18. If a man dies when you hang him, keep hanging him until he gets used to it.

19. A sure cure for seasickness is to sit under a tree.

20. How long was I in the army? Five foot eleven.

21. I once locked my keys out of my car. I had to break out of my car with a coat hanger.

22. I replaced the headlights in my car with strobe lights, so it looks like I'm the only one moving.

23. I went to this restaurant last night that was set up like a big buffet in the shape of an Ouija board. You'd think about what kind of food you want, and the table would move across the floor to it.

24. On the other hand, you have different fingers.

25. When I was a fetus, I used to sneak out at night when my mother was sleeping. I figured I should start stealing stuff while I still had no fingerprints.

26. Yesterday I parked my car in a tow-away zone...when I came back the entire area was missing.

27. I almost had a psychic girlfriend but she left me before we met.

28. If sub specie aeternitatis [from eternity's point of view] there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.

29. Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.

30. Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation.

31. What if nothing exists and we're all in somebody's dream? Or what's worse, what if only that fat guy in the third row exists?

32. Taste my tuna casserole - tell me if I put in too much hot fudge.

33. I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.

34. How is it possible to find meaning in a finite world, given my waist and shirt size?

35. Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful.

36. It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm - this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the 'why' arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.

37. The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.

38. Art and work and art and life are very connected and my whole life has been absurd. There isn't a thing in my life that has happened that hasn't been extreme - personal health, family, economic situations...absurdity is the key word...

39. 'We, Seth, Emperor of Azania, Chief of Chiefs of Sakuyu, Lord of Wanda and Tyrant of the Seas, Bachelor of the Arts of Oxford University, being in this the twenty-fourth year of our life, summoned by the wisdom of Almighty God and the unanimous voice of our people to the throne of our ancestors, do hereby proclaim. . .' Seth paused in his dictation and gazed out across the harbour where in the fresh breeze of early morning the last dhow was setting sail for the open sea. 'Rats,' he said; 'stinking curs. They are all running away.'

40. If you'd take your head home and boil it for a turnip it might be useful. I can't say. But it might.

41. If the formula for water is H2O, is the formula for an ice cube H2O squared?

42. Arrest his green ass. Get him out of here. Get his green monkey ass out of here. Hey, arrest him, he's guilty of shoving Chicken McNuggets straight up his ass, arrest him.

43. I drink too much. Way too much. I gave a urine sample, there was an olive in it.

44. I went to the doctor because I'd swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. My doctor told me to have a few drinks and get some rest.

45. I'm ugly I'm tellin' ya. My proctologist, he stuck his finger in my mouth.

46. One day I was driving home and saw a guy jogging naked. I asked why, he said, ''Cause you came home early!'

47. I was lucky enough on this trip to interview none other than the late Adolf Hitler. I was gratified to learn that he now feels remorse for any actions of his, however indirectly, which might have had anything to do with the violent deaths suffered by thirty-five million people during World War II. He and his mistress Eva Braun, of course were among those casualties, along with four million other Germans, six million Jews, eighteen million citizens of the Soviet Union and so on. 'I paid my dues with everyone else,' he said. It is his hope that a modest monument, possibly a stone cross, since he was a Christian, will be erected somewhere in his memory, possibly on the grounds of the United Nations Headquarters in New York. It should be incised, he said, with his name and dates 1889-1945. Underneath should be a two-word sentence in German: 'Entschuldigen Sie.' Roughly translated into English, this comes out, 'I beg your pardon,' or 'Excuse Me.'

48. 'No no, Jock:we're going to push him out of a window. Your bedroom window, I think. Yes, and we'll undress him first and say that he was making advances to you and jumped out of the window in a frenzy of thwarted love.' 'I say, Charlie, really, what a filthy rotten idea; I mean, think of my wife.' 'I never think of policemen's wives, their beauty maddens me like wine.'

49. Is a hippopotamus really a hippopotomus or just a really cool opotamus?

50. I tried to walk into Target, but I missed.[1]

51. See, this CD is in stores. The only way I could get my last CD into a store was to take one in there and leave it. 'Sir, you forgot this!' 'No, I did not. That is for 'sale'. Please alphabetize 'it'.'[2]

52. I drank some boiling water 'cuz I wanted to whistle

53. I went to the doctor because I'd swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. My doctor told me to have a few drinks and get some rest.

54. For a while I didn't have a car...I had a helicopter...no place to park it, so I just tied it to a lamp post and left it running...[slow glance upward]

55. Michael: 'March here, march there, present arms, where's your cap?' - you've no idea, the whole Army's obsessed with playing at soldiers.

56. You can't kill a vegetable by shooting it in the head.

57. If something worth living for is worth dying for, what about something not worth dying for?

58. The divine availability of the condemned man before whom the prison doors open in a certain early dawn, that unbelievable disinterestedness with regard to everything except for the pure flame of life - it is clear that death and the absurd are here the principles of the only reasonable freedom: that which a human heart can experience and live.

59. Waffles may have actually originated in a penguin tank. (Nun grabs his hand and whacks it with a ruler) Ouch!

60. What am I looking at? I want to eat you like a tossed fucking salad!

61. Little Miss Muffet Sat on a tuffet A lightbulb was stuck up her ass. It woke up the spider Who lived deep inside her. He said 'Hey, free electric and gas.'

62. La vie est la farce a mener par tous.

63. Life always provides me with better jokes than any I could invent.

64. He founded a religion, of which the main tenets were transmigration of souls and the sinfulness of eating beans.

65. Since the world is what it is, it is clear that valid reasoning from sound principles cannot lead to error; but a principle may be so nearly true as to deserve theoretical respect, and yet may lead to practical consequences which we feel to be absurd. There is therefore a justification for common sense in philosophy, but only as showing that our theoretical principles cannot be quite correct so long as their consequences are condemned by an appeal to common sense which we feel to be irresistible. The theorist may retort that common sense is no more infallible than logic. But this retort, though made by Berkeley and Hume, would have been wholly foreign to Locke's intellectual temper.

66. According to an opinion poll, 13 per cent of women in the United States cannot say whether they wear their tights under their knickers or over them. That's something like 12 million women walking around in a state of chronic foundation garment uncertainty. Perhaps because I so seldom wear ladies' clothing I don't fully appreciate the challenge involved, but I am almost certain that if I did wear tights with knickers I would know which was on top. More to the point, if a stranger with a clipboard came up to me in the street and asked me how my underwear was configured, I don't believe I would tell him that I didn't know.

67. He was doing stuff that was surreal.

68. A lot of people were very upset, especially people in Palm Beach County, who were saying that they had accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan, which was clearly a mistake. Even Pat Buchanan admitted this. 'You'd have to be nuts to vote for me!' he declared. 'Hell, I didn't even vote for me!'

69. 'It was torture. Straight torture, son. First he put my nuts on a dresser. It was crazy, just my nuts. Then he banged 'em shits with a spiked bat like, 'Ba-OOOOWW!!' then they sewed my asshole shut and kept feeding me and feeding me and feeding me. This all took place in the slums of Shao-Lin. It was the RZA, the GZA, Ol' Dirty Bastard, Raekwon 'Da Chef', U-God, Inspectah Deck and, of course, Method Man.'

70. P. Diddy: All right, you guys ain't working as a team. I'm gonna have to shut down the studio. The only way I'll reopen the studio is if you go up to the Bronx, and get me some breast milk from a Cambodian immigrant.

71. People who work at Disneyland who walk around dressed up as Goofy, apparently, under no circumstances are they allowed to remove their outfits when they're in the parks. So you have these people in 80lb Goofy costumes, running around in 110 degree heat. Even if you happen to vomit, you're not allowed to remove your costume in front of the children because they'll freak out and won't believe that Goofy is a real animal. Once you're wearing those costumes, you're not even allowed a regular piss break. I guess you could just piss in your suit. But imagine if you're five years old and the first time you met Minnie Mouse she smelled of piss and vomit.

72. Hello. I'm David Letterman and I'm not wearing any pants.

73. 'Maybe Nina wouldn't have died if I hadn't moved in with them and drawn Sheener after me, but I can't feel guilty about that. I tried hard to be a good foster daughter to them, and they were happy with me. What happened was that life dropped a big custard pie on us, and that's not my fault; you can never see the custard pies coming. It's not good slapstick if you see the pie coming.' 'Custard pie?' he asked, perplexed. 'You see life as a slapstick comedy? Like the Three Stooges?' 'Partly.' 'Life is just a joke then?' 'No. Life is serious and a joke at the same time.' 'But how can that be?' 'If you don't know,' she said, 'maybe I should be the one asking the questions here.'

74. Fric had been assigned the dumbest of the standard tones, which the phone manufacturer described as 'a cheerful, child-pleasing sound suitable for the nursery or the bedrooms of younger children.' Why infants in nurseries or toddlers in cribs ought to have their own telephones remained a mystery to Fric. Were they going to call Babies R Us and order lobster-flavored teething rings?

75. Like the Bible, devolution is basically an extended joke. One man's doughnut is another man's death.

76. Arrest his green ass. Get him out of here. Get his green monkey ass out of here. Hey, arrest him, he's guilty of shoving Chicken McNuggets straight up his ass, arrest him.

77. 'Hi, how are you today? I'm Tony, I'm going to be your server. I've got some very exciting specials to tell you folks about right here. We've got our deep-pan re-re-fried chocolate ice cream pizza, which comes with a complimentary pacemaker. If you're watching your weight you might want to try our NoHo Protein Salad, absolutely delicious. Philippe, our maitre d', will dig out some photographs of you looking kind of tubby, you know, on the Internet, and then we all kind of point and laugh at you and just sort of rub a single chickpea on your lip until you cry. Would you like some water?'

78. I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. ... I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. ... I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

79. American Beer is a lot like making love on a canoe - it's fucking close to water.

80. The other day a man phoned and wanted me to endorse a certain brand of cigarettes. I had nothing against them and in fact will smoke them or anything else that comes along, but I didn't know why he was bothering me. I thought maybe if I was nice they'd give me a carton as a thank offering, so I rather tentatively broached the matter of remuneration. What was the endorsement worth, I asked, and he said three thousand dollars. What are you going to do in an atmosphere like that?

81. This question of yours, Sir, about my being a house painter - or rather, not a question, you simply made a statement - is typical of the whole character of this trial that is being foisted on me. You may object that it is not a trial at all; you are quite right, for it is only a trial if I recognize it as such. But for the moment I do recognize it, on grounds of compassion, as it were. One can't regard it except with compassion, if one is to regard it at all. I do not say that your procedure is contemptible, but I should like to present that epithet to you for your private consumption.

82. The AEC of course has a logical explanation for this absurd situtation...Their regulations say that secret information may be given to a foreigner only when this is necessary to the national defense. Obviously, if the information is not vital military information, it cannot be necessary to the national defense to give it to me. Therefore I can have the important military secrets but not the unimportant civilian secrets. It is the craziest joke I ever heard.

83. He imposed obligatory military service for men over eighteen, declared to be public property any animals walking the streets after six in the evening, and made men who were overage wear red armbands. He sequestered Father Nicanor in the parish house under pain of execution and prohibited him from saying mass or ringing the bells unless it was for a Liberal victory. In order that no one would doubt the severity of his aims, he ordered a firing squad organized in the square and had it shoot a scarecrow. At first no one took him seriously. (p. 104)

84. I distinguish between maniacs and crazy people. A maniac will beat 9 people to death with a steel dildo. A crazy person will beat 9 people to death with a steel dildo, but he'll be wearing a Bugs Bunny suit at the time.

85. One guy, about a month ago, was given three consecutive life terms, plus two death penalties. How the fuck do you serve that? Even David Copperfield can't do that shit. In order to do that, you'd have to be a Hindu.

86. I've found him, I have Jesus in the trunk.

87. Honk if your horn is broken.

88. When you sneeze, all the numbers in your head go up by one.

89. Prayer: please let me find a nymphomaniac coke connection who owns a Ferrari dealership.

90. What is soul? I don't know! Soul is a hamhock in your cornflakes... Soul is a joint rolled in toilet paper.

91. Dada is for dreams,colourful paper masks, kettle drums, sound poems, concretions, poem statiques, for things that are not far from picking flowers and making bouquets.

92. You know the man who told me about it on the bus, as it went up the hill out of Scranton, Pennsylvania, he shrugged his shoulders, he shook his head, and he said (and this is exactly what he said) 'Boy that sure must've been something. Just imagine thirty thousand pounds of bananas. Yes, there were thirty thousand pounds of mashed bananas. Of bananas. Just bananas. Thirty thousand pounds. of Bananas-not no driver now. Just bananas!'

93. 'Can't the lemons and pancakes just get along?'

94. 'One day, when I was young, my Dad brought home a guitar. I was quite intrigued and went to pick it up but he said, 'Son, unless you can wail on that thing like Nuno Bettencourt from Extreme or maybe Steve Vai when he was playing with David Lee Roth and he had the sweet double-necked guitar that was like two legs coming out of a heart, keep your damn hands off it!' And I never touched a guitar again. So to answer your question, yes, I answer the phone whether it rings or not.'

95. 'You could be a hit man for the Scorpions; your job is to kill people and make me macaroni and cheese.'

96. 'Je suis un pamplemousse. DONNEZ-MOI TOUS VOS CROISSANTS! (I am a grapefruit. GIVE ME ALL YOUR CROISSANTS!)'

97. On New Years resolutions: 'I need to get like 34% more hyphy this year, shred 17.4% more often, use 2,000 more notes in each solo, my guitar needs to shoot flames that are at least 10 feet longer than they used to be, aaaand probably 1 more pound of lasers.'

98. In point of fact, the meteor was something like 30 km when it exploded. It was over north Waterloo and I was north of St Agatha. Two spherical clouds, and two explosions. Unfortunately, I was dealing with a goat that was trying to eat an oil truck's fuel line, goats having this optimistic 'Well, maybe it has become edible since they last time I tried this' worldview, and I missed seeing the explosions.

99. Geraldine: I've no idea who my father was. Prentice: I'd better be frank, Miss Barclay. I can't employ you if you're in any way miraculous. It would be contrary to established practice. You did have a father? Geraldine: Oh, I'm sure I did. My mother was frugal in her habits, but she'd never economize unwisely.

100. Rance: A search party must be organized. What have you in the way of dogs? Prentice: A spaniel and a miniature poodle. Rance: Let them be unleashed!