the old man laughed loud and joyously, shook up the details of his anatomy from head to foot, and ended by saying that such a laugh was money in a-man's pocket, because it cut down the doctor's bill like everything.

If you want to pick out the people who go crazy from time to time in my family, find the ones in the photos who look ten or more years younger than they actually are. Maybe it's because we laugh and cry a lot and have a hard time figuring out what to do next. It keeps the facial muscles toned up.

It is cheerful to God when you rejoice or laugh from the bottom of your heart.

I was in the kitchen drinking coffee when I heard Coretta cry, Martin, Martin, come quickly! I put down my cup and ran toward the living room. As I approached the front window Coretta pointed joyfully to a slowly moving bus: Darling, it's empty!

I should have been reminded that disappointment produces despair and despair produces bitterness, and that the one thing certain about bitterness is its blindness. Bitterness has not the capacity to make the distinction between some and all.

I endeavoured to cheer and amuse her by reminiscences of my adventures in Afghanistan; but, to tell the truth, I was myself so excited at our situation, and so curious as to our destination, that my stories were slightly involved. To this day she declares that I told her one moving anecdote as to how a musket looked into my tent at the dead of night, and how I fired a double-barrelled tiger cub at it.

I play the game for the game's own sake

A dog reflects the family life. Whoever saw a frisky dog in a gloomy family, or a sad dog in a happy one?

He seems a very amiable person," said Holmes, laughing. "I am not quite so bulky, but if he had remained I might have shown him that my grip was not much more feeble than his own." As he spoke he picked up the steel poker and, with a sudden effort, straightened it out again.

The cause of laughter in every case is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real objects which have been thought through it in some relation, and laughter itself is just the expression of this incongruity.... All laughter then is occasioned by a paradox.... This, briefly stated, is the true explanation of the ludicrous.

the same disposition that impelled the Greeks and Romans to embellish their precious sarcophagi precisely as we still see them, with festivals, dancing, weddings,4 hunts, animal combat, bacchanals, thus with depictions of the most powerful press of life,i which they bring before us not only in such entertainments, but in group debauchery extending even to the point of copulation between satyrs and goats.

I forgot what we were celebrating. Because we were always celebrating something, a new job, a new poem, a new love, a new dream.