Quotes About Irony

You've got some 'Star-Spangled' nails in your coffin, kid. That's what they've done for you, son.

There's no possibility of being witty without a little ill-nature.

It's like life, isn't it? You think you'll outrun it, that you're better than it, but it makes a fool of you every time. It runs you into the ground and steams off whistling away, happy as buggery with itself.

I'm intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.

For a time after my divorce everything began to seem profoundly ironic to me. I found myself thinking of other peoples' worries as sources of amusement and private derision which I thought about at night to make myself feel better.

My name's not José, goddamn it." I cast a wintry eye at Lynette's spurious beigey Jesus nailed to the siding. He makes life a perfect misery for as many as he can, then never takes the heat. He should try resurrection in today's complex world. He'd fall right off His cross on His ass. He couldn't sell newspapers.

Sarcasm is irony which has lost its soul

Irony - The modern mode: either the devil's mark or the snorkel of sanity.

Sarcasm was dangerous to its user, identifiable as the language of the wrecker and the saboteur. But irony – perhaps, sometimes, so he hoped – might enable you to preserve what you valued, even as the noise of time became loud enough to knock out window-panes.

History was repeating itself: the first time as farce, the second time as tragedy.

If you turned your back on irony, it curdled into sarcasm. And what good was it then? Sarcasm was irony which had lost its soul.

In Jewish folk music, despair is disguised as the dance. And so, truth's disguise was irony.

Tragedies in hindsight look like farces.

One way of legitimising coincidences, of course, is to call them ironies. That

The self-doubt of the young is nothing compared to the self-doubt of the old. And this, perhaps, was their final triumph over him. Instead of killing him, they had allowed him to live, and by allowing him to live, they had killed him. This was the final, unanswerable irony to his life: that by allowing him to live, they had killed him.

We didn't do anger in my family. We did ironic comment, snappy rejoinder, satirical elaboration; we did exact words forbidding a certain action, and more severe ones condemning what had already taken place. But for anything beyond this, we did the thing enjoined upon the English middle classes for generations. We internalised our rage, our anger, our contempt. We spoke words under our breath.

When truth-speaking becomes impossible - because it led to immediate death - it had to be disguised. In Jewish folk music, despair is disguised as the dance. And so, truth's disguise was irony.

And yet sometimes I wonder if the wittiest, most resonant irony isn't just a well-brushed, well-educated coincidence

It seemed that Soviet power had finally decided to love him; and he had never felt a clammier embrace.

We were essentially taking the piss, except when we were serious. He was essentially serious, except when he was taking the piss. It took us a while to work this out.

But you cannot leave Susan. How could you bear to withdraw your love from her? If you didn't love her, who would? And maybe it is worse than this. It is not just that you love her, but that you are addicted to her. How ironic would that be?

pustular berk with the charisma of a plimsole

Irony, he had come to realise, was as vulnerable to the accidents of life and time as any other sense. You woke up one morning and no longer knew if your tongue was in your cheek; and even if it was, whether that mattered anymore, whether anyone noticed. You imagined you were issuing a beam of ultraviolet light, but what if it failed to register because it was off the spectrum known to everyone else?

Not for the last time she was struck by the tyranny of the socially inept. Endless effort is harnessed to a sluggish and boring conversation simply to preserve these dullards from a sense of their inadequacy. The irony being that they are quite impervious to their own shortcomings.