Quotes About Irony

I think, today's irony ends up saying: How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.

Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.

It's like there's some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn't happy.

Imagine the day after the Berlin Wall came down if everybody in East Germany was plump and comfortable-looking and dressed in Caribbean pastels, and you'll have a pretty good idea what the Fort Lauderdale Airport terminal looks like today.

The worst thing about irony for me is that it attenuates emotion.

You know those mass-market cartridges, for the masses? The ones that are so bad they're somehow perversely good? This was worse than that.

It's not a rhetorical mode that wears well. As Hyde (whom I pretty obviously like) puts it, "Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage." 32 This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It's critical

Phoneless Cord in his stocking, ostentatiously packaged

Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists.

and I emerge so icky and befouled and cross-eyed from the guy's right hook that I blow what should have been a very legitimate shot at the title in the Men's Best Legs Contest, in which I end up placing third but am told later I would have won the whole thing except for the scowl, swollen and strabismic right eye, and askew swimcap that formed a contextual backdrop too downright goofy to let the full force of my gams' shapeliness come through to the judges.

I don't think irony's meant to synergize with anything as heartfelt as sadness.

Commercial comedy's often set up to feature an ironist making devastating sport of someone who's naive or sentimental or pretentious or pompous.

Irony and hip ennui are extremely authoritarian.

Here is how to avoid thinking about any of this by practicing and playing until everything runs on autopilot and talent's unconscious exercise becomes a way to escape yourself, a long waking dream of pure play. The irony is that this makes you very good, and you start to become regarded as having a prodigious talent to live up to.

Let's not sit around and give each other hand-jobs.

David Foster Wallace

She kept . . . using the, well, the quote L-word itself several times without irony or any evident awareness that the word has through tactical over-deployment become trite and requires invisible quotes around it now at the very least.

For irony—exploiting gaps between what's said and what's meant, between how things try to appear and how they really are—is the time-honored way artists seek to illuminate and explode hypocrisy.

Postmodern irony and cynicism has become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving.

The girl's sense of ridicule was far stronger than her gratitude.

William Makepeace Thackeray

They're going to drown me in milk--what a waste of good baby-food!

When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.

Why then, O brawling love! O loving hate! O any thing, of nothing first create! O heavy lightness, serious vanity, Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms, Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health, Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is! This love feel I, that feel no love in this.