“Hey,” he said. “Hi.” Oh, damn. It was awkward.“What’re you doing?”“Shearing a sheep. It’s cold outside, and I need a new hat.”He paused. “You’re joking, right?”“Yes, Marshall.” I gnawed on my fingers some more and sunk back in my chair.”

“Stanley forced a smile to his lips at the memory of the onesided romance; it was silly, after all, a stupid childhood crush. Who’d fall in love with a fictional character? That was the kind of thing you laughed about as an adult. Or at least Harriet had thought so. He couldn’t quite do it, though. Couldn’t quite see it as a joke. It had felt too real, too raw and wild and fierce, for him todismiss it even now. It was love, of a sort, stunted and unformed as it was. For a time, it had kept him sane.”

“Jack didn’t fully get Jesus. Audrey tried to explain it, and he could repeat it back to her, word for word, but he still didn’t comprehend most of it. The best he could gather was that Jesus lived long ago, told people to be nice, and they killed him for it. At the end, he asked who was Jesus’ necromancer and if he was in the Bible, then Kaldar couldn’t stop laughing and had to sit down.”

“Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke.”

“Creating a business that doesn’t require a sacrifice of your happiness and family is no joke. Choose lifestyle over business.Create a lifestyle business.”

“All great thinkers…. can be wipeout by constant trauma. (It’s a fun event… every person who thinks is free to say what he desires… can come and join…)”

“Pouring water on dry feces will just give bad odour”

“Happiness is a big joke; let us laugh at it loud.”

“The joke is generally in the oddest way the truth and yet not the fact.”

“I started studying law, but this I could stand just for one semester. I couldn’t stand more. Then I studied languages and literature for two years. After two years I passed an examination with the result I have a teaching certificate for Latin and Hungarian for the lower classes of the gymnasium, for kids from 10 to 14. I never made use of this teaching certificate. And then I came to philosophy, physics, and mathematics. In fact, I came to mathematics indirectly. I was really more interested in physics and philosophy and thought about those. It is a little shortened but not quite wrong to say: I thought I am not good enough for physics and I am too good for philosophy. Mathematics is in between.”

“A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there. A theologian is the man who finds it.”

“We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.”

“And it’s Gryfindor in possession again, as Johnson takes the Quaffle— Flint alongside her —poke him in the eye, Angelina —it was a joke, professor, it was a joke…”

“In eternity there is no time, only an instant long enough for a joke.”