Donald Ray Pollock Quotes

Certainly, anyone whom I've witnessed, who has gone through something horrible and life-changing, has a sense of ironic humor, or an ability to look at the peculiarities of the world and find humor in it.

I'm sure there are people who survive tragedy without humor, but I've never met any of them. Nor would I be particularly interested in writing about them if I did meet them.

I remember, growing up, if something big - God forbid - happened, the first jokes you heard on the subject came out of Jersey.

When the doctors showed me an X-ray of my brain, they pointed to a black hole on the upper left side and told me that all memory from that spot was dead. I thought to myself that I hoped that's where I kept 'The Orange Blossom Special.'

Sometimes the only way to deal with horrific things in life is through a dark sense of humor.

Humor is to get us over terrible things.

The more trauma and bad experiences you have, the more you are able to laugh on yourself and the situation.

People always ask me how I manage to find humor in so much bleakness. I think this is almost a necessary skill to have.

A lot of time, people enter the most depressing situations, and they are the funniest people on Earth, because they have to be. It's a coping mechanism.

I find myself laughing at really bad situations.

You can find humor in most things, and even terrible things.

I'll see something awful on the street and I'll come home and say to my boyfriend, "I just saw the funniest thing on the street." It's a stance. It's the way I was born, or the way I was damaged.

Feeling different, feeling alienated, feeling persecuted, feeling that the only way to deal with the world is to laugh - because if you don't laugh you're going to cry and never stop crying - that's probably what's responsible for the Jews having developed such a great sense of humor. The people who had the greatest reason to weep, learned more than anyone else how to laugh.

Through humor, you can soften some of the worst blows that life delivers.

Trust Emmett to find the joke in the destruction of my life.

They say that if you get bored enough with calamity you can learn to laugh.

Even in drama, I like to try to find the humor because I think it's very human. Even in the depths of dreadful situations, there's usually something rather comic, or something you can laugh about afterwards, at least.

We've got to laugh or break our hearts in this damnable world.

Maintaining self-respect in the face of a devastating experience is of prime importance.

When the news you don't want to hear is looming before you like Everest, two things can happen. Tragedy can run you through like a sword, or it can become your backbone. Either you fall apart and sob, or you say, 'Right. What's next?

When you're an orphan, you don't wake up every day and tell yourself, "I'm an orphan again today. Why did this happen to me?" You just get on with your life. I've had other challenges that were much greater than that.

Funny, how just when you think life can’t possibly get any worse it suddenly does.

It's impossible to write about Native life without humor-that's how people maintain sanity.

If you can't laugh when things go bad--laugh and put on a little carnival--then you're either dead or wishing you were.

I'm someone who lived in a war for five years. I received bombs on my head every day of my childhood. Did that stop me from living? Did that stop me from laughing?