Gallows Humor Quotes

“So this is it," said Arthur, "We are going to die."
"Yes," said Ford, "except... no! Wait a minute!" He suddenly lunged across the chamber at something behind Arthur's line of vision. "What's this switch?" he cried.
"What? Where?" cried Arthur, twisting round.
"No, I was only fooling," said Ford, "we are going to die after all.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“The idea of being strong for someone else having never entered their heads, I find myself in the position of having to console them. Since I'm the person going in to be slaughtered, this is somewhat annoying.”
― Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire

“We who think we are about to die will laugh at anything.”
― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

“First the doctor told me the good news: I was going to have a disease named after me.”
― Steve Martin

“Men die. It's practically what they're for.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“Nothing like an arcane literary debate with your tyrannical master while you pass the time leading to your execution.”
― Elizabeth Wein, Code Name Verity

“The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.”
― Sigmund Freud

“His hatred for all was so intense that it should extinguish the very love from which it was conceived. And thus, he ceased to feel. There was nothing further in which to believe that made the prospect of feeling worthwhile. Daily he woke up and cast downtrodden eyes upon the sea and he would say to himself with a hint of regret at his hitherto lack of indifference, 'All a dim illusion, was it? Surely it was foolish of me to think any of this had meaning.' He would then spend hours staring at the sky, wondering how best to pass the time if everything—even the sky itself— were for naught. He arrived at the conclusion that there was no best way to pass the time. The only way to deal with the illusion of time was to endure it, knowing full well, all the while, that one was truly enduring nothing at all. Unfortunately for him, this nihilistic resolution to dispassion didn’t suit him very well and he soon became extremely bored. Faced now with the choice between further boredom and further suffering, he impatiently chose the latter, sailing another few weeks along the coast , and then inland, before finally dropping anchor off the shores of the fishing village of Yami.”
― Ashim Shanker, Only the Deplorable

“Life is warped. I'm just in sync.”
― Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam

“Live, die, something else lives. The very soil humanity walks upon is built up from death. Digging into a flowerbed means digging into bones.”
― M. Jones, Frankie & Formaldehyde

“Gallows humor is part of having a doctor in the house. Deal with it.”
― J.R. Ward, Lover Enshrined

“Fell?' he asked. 'Or was pushed?'

Anton shrugged again. 'It hardly makes a difference,' he said, 'when you are the man at the bottom of the stairs.”
― Michael Montoure, Slices

“SPOILER ALERT: We all die in the end.”
― Stewart Stafford

“I hope I died honorably. I have a great deal to atone for. - Eler Nersal”
― Lynda Williams

“I read a report that said 88% of adults trust their doctors - well, 100% of dead people don't!”
― Stewart Stafford

“For the past ten days, I've had a migraine that follows me like a shadow. One hundred and forty-two hours of incessant pain, an eight on the ten-point scale. My doctor has suggested codeine, which I refused, because once I took too much Percocet after a tooth extraction and threw up for twenty-four hours straight. I have a CT scan, an MRI, I go to the neurologist—the readings are all inconclusive. I'm told it's a migraine with an unknown cause. Have you tried yoga? they say.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“The dead, Your Honor, do not agonize over their crimes and do not long to be happy, as you know.”
― Hassan Blasim, The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq

“I prithee give me leave to curse awhile.”
― William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 1

“Jake looked better now, dead, than I did, alive. Certainly less stressed.”
― John Scalzi, Starter Villain

“If I could return as a ghost, there are so many people, beginning with the judge of the Court of Cassation, that I would like to terrify. It would be wonderful to scare them witless and make them grovel.”
― Kanno Sugako, Reflexiones de camino a la horca

“Do you know what irony is, de Leon?

They make swords out of it, don't they? Mix it with coally and hit it with a hammery?”
― Jay Kristoff, Empire of the Vampire

“But what are we going to do?" Colonel Cathcart exclaimed with distress. "The others are all waiting outside."
"Why don't we give him a medal?" Colonel Korn proposed.
"For going around twice? What can we give him a medal for?"
"For goung around twice," Colonel Korn answered with a reflective, self-satisfied smile. "After all, I suppose it did take a lot of courage to go over the target a second time with no other planes around to divert the antiaircraft fire. And he did hit the bridge. You know, that might be the answer—to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That's a trick that never seems to fail.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“When a violent murder occurs most people always expect it was a man, most never expect a woman, sometimes if we are not wary, we literally can be a victim of our expectations.”
― C.A.A. Savastano

“You can’t call yourself a mortician till you’ve slept in a casket.”
― W.H. Cameron, Crossroad

“If I wake up in the morning and see a bedroom ceiling, I say: "Another day? Let's go!" If I woke up and saw a wooden coffin or urn lid, I'd probably say: "Oh...back to bed.”
― Stewart Stafford

“It was this story, delivered in Robert's signature south Derry monotone, that had my dad in literal and figurative stitches in the amputation ward. Despite being a Catholic who loved and admired Pope John Paul II, who had even sent two of his daughters to sing for the man, my dad found the whole thing unaccountably hilarious for exactly the same reason I did: so many horrific, depressing and awful things have happened in Northern Ireland in his lifetime that whatever joy can be taken from incidents in which no one was physically harmed will be seized with both hands.
Contradictions like this - my extremely Catholic father laughing his head off in a hospital bed at news of Protestant slaughtermen mocking the pope's death - are hard to explain to people who aren't from Northern Ireland. There's a gallows humour that freaks them out, and they don't know how they should react.”
― Séamas O'Reilly, Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir

“Fine. When they shovel our frozen corpses out next spring, they can put 'They thought it would be fun' on our gravestone.”
― Patricia Briggs, Winter Lost

“Shrewd Shakespeare understood that the paradox of drama also ticks at the heart of life itself: we can't truly bear, understand or transcend tragedy without humour and we definitely appreciate levity more when unburdened from pitch darkness. Deepest drama often demands a sudden crash of laughter's lightning bolt. Surgically-wielded comic relief, used with acute awareness of audience and moment, doesn't merely lighten a heavy scene; it provides the critical human counterpoint, a vital exhale allowing the audience to bear the weight, and feel it all the more intensely when tension returns, effectively disproving the literally-minded misconception that to laugh at something is to disrespect it or not take it seriously. This profound effect isn't just theatrical technique; it taps into a timeless human impulse—gallows humour, whistling past the graveyard—a deep-seated capacity to find release and digest life's bitterest truths, even in the face of overwhelming gravity.”
― Stewart Stafford

“I’m history’s last fucking joke—burned out in a senior center doing Namaste Yoga while God shows up in a saltine cracker, calls me a coward, and offers me a cigarette. That’s it. That’s the punchline. So fuck your hope, and fuck your healing. I’m already holy. I’m already gone.”
― Jonathan Harnisch, Glad You're Not Me

“She’d woken in some rank places over the years… this place won all the terrible first-place prizes.”
— Andrea, Chapter 1”
― K.T. George, Conjoined