Quotes About Irony

It is a tragic and potentially lethal irony that those who most despise science and the method of free inquiry should have been able to pilfer from it and annex its sophisticated products to their sick dreams.

The literal mind can never understand the ironic mind.

The most satisfying compliment a reader can pay is to tell me that he or she feels personally addressed. Think of your own favorite authors and see if that isn't precisely one of the things that engage you, often at first without your noticing it. A good conversation is the only human equivalent: the realizing that decent points are being made and understood, that irony is in play, and elaboration, and that a dull or obvious remark would be almost physically hurtful.

In our native terms, the ironic style is often compounded with the sardonic and the hard-boiled; even the effortlessly superior. But irony originates in the glance and the shrug of the loser, the outsider, the despised minority. It is a nuance that comes most effortlessly to the oppressed.

I defend Salman Rushdie because it a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression

You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you." Unconscious of the account to which this irony might be charged, she then told of the sufferer's reply: "Then please tell him to stop kissing me.

And now behold what this pious old trout hath wrought.

Incidentally, by what awful ironic betrayal of our language do we find ourselves accusing bigots and tribalists of the sin of 'discrimination'? They are the ones who judge severely by category, and yet can't tell anyone apart. 'Discrimination' is only one of the moral and intellectual exercises that they are quite unable to perform.

The point is that Socrates was mocking his accusers in their own terms, saying in effect: I do not know for certain about death and the gods—but I am as certain as I can be that you do not know, either.

A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so.

Billy Wilder, Lenny Bruce, Saul

I know what's coming you see. I know no one beats these odds and I know it's a matter of getting used to that and realizing that you are expelled from your mother's uterus as if shot from a cannon towards a barn door studded with old nail files and rusty hooks. It's a matter of how you use up the intervening time in an intelligent and ironic way; and try not to do anything ghastly to your fellow creatures.

Goodness is beauty in its best mistake

Sarcasm will make your tits fall off.

I've won Satan's lottery.

I'll bet he was myrrh. Bastard, he brings the cheapest gift and now he wants to sodomize me.

You see, I explained to Joshua, what Joy is doing is ironic, yet that's not her intent. That's the difference between irony and sarcasm. Irony can be spontaneous, while sarcasm requires volition. You have to create sarcasm. No kidding? said Josh. Why do I waste my time with you?

About to be hanged is my status quo, not a condition that requires your repair.

Andrew Lloyd Webber's version of the Kool-Aid jingle is at once chilling and evocative. Donny Osmond is brilliant as James Jones.

My kingdom for a razor-blade cowcatcher and Cuisinart wheel covers to cut my path through this herd of ignorant peasant meat, she thought. Then: Whoa, I guess I really do need the meds.

he realized, with no little sense of irony, that until he became Death, he'd never felt so alive.

What a bawdy bitch is fate when the best bit of a bloke's day is a brace of bloody mermaid murders.

Blessed are the dumbfucks

You see," I explained to Joshua, "what Joy is doing is ironic, yet that's not her intent. That's the difference between irony and sarcasm. Irony can be spontaneous, while sarcasm requires volition. You have to create sarcasm.