Irony Quotes - Page 4

This is not the "relativism of truth" presented by journalistic takes on postmodernism. Rather, the ironist's cage is a state of irony by way of powerlessness and inactivity: In a world where terrorism makes cultural relativism harder and harder to defend against its critics, marauding international corporations follow fair-trade practices, increasing right-wing demagoguery and violence can't be answered in kind, and the first black U.S. president turns out to lean right of center, the intelligentsia can see no clear path of action. Irony dominates as a "mockery of the promise and fitness of things," to return to the OED definition of irony.This thinking is appropriate to Wes Anderson, whose central characters are so deeply locked in ironist cages that his films become two-hour documents of them rattling their ironist bars. Without the irony dilemma Roth describes, we would find it hard to explain figures like Max Fischer, Steve Zissou, Royal Tenenbaum, Mr. Fox, and Peter Whitman. I'm not speaking here of specific political beliefs. The characters in question aren't liberals; they may in fact, along with Anderson himself, have no particular political or philosophical interests. But they are certainly involved in a frustrated and digressive kind of irony that suggests a certain political situation. Though intensely self-absorbed and central to their films, Anderson's protagonists are neither heroes nor antiheroes. These characters are not lovable eccentrics. They are not flawed protagonists either, but are driven at least as much by their unsavory characteristics as by any moral sense. They aren't flawed figures who try to do the right thing; they don't necessarily learn from their mistakes; and we aren't asked to like them in spite of their obvious faults. Though they usually aren't interested in making good, they do set themselves some kind of mission--Anderson's films are mostly quest movies in an age that no longer believes in quests, and this gives them both an old-fashioned flavor and an air of disillusionment and futility.

Arved Mark Ashby

Everyone Deserves An Equal Footing.

R.E. Conary

For 'wellness', naturally is no cause of complaint--people relish it, they enjoy it, they are at the furthest pole from complaint. People complain of feeling ill--not well. Unless, as George Eliot does, they have some intimation of 'wrongness' or danger, either through knowledge or association, or the very excess of excess. Thus, though a patient will scarcely complain of being 'very well', they may become suspicious if they feel 'too well'.

Oliver Sacks

You say ‘cure.’ I hear ‘you’re not human enough.

John Scalzi

I didn't think that Herefordshire Social Services would be best pleased about me dumping a poorly socialised pre-teen with mind control powers on them.

Ben Aaronovitch

There are fascinating possibilities in this situation. I'd get it down on paper if I were you.

Joe Orton

You don't buy poetry. (Neither do I.)Why?You cannot afford it? Bosh! You spendEditions de luxe on a thirsty friend.You can buy any one of the poetry bunchFor the price you pay for a business lunch. Don't you suppose that a hungry head,Like an empty stomach, ought to be fed?Looking into myself, I find this true, So I hardly can figure it false in you.

Edmund Vance Cooke

My mother had not acted for ten years. Not since a reviewer wrote that her portrayal of Lady Macbeth put him in mind of an exasperated society hostess burdened with unmannerly guests who had lost the new tennis balls, left the bathrooms in a mess, and finished the gin.

Victoria Clayton

How many times do I have to tell you? We are not gangsters!

Peter Cimino

Put a tiger on your tank

murakami

There is nothing worse then being surrounded by a bunch of people telling you to do what is right, when they can't define that definition, without a lot of hatred and judgment behind it.

Shannon L. Alder

You see, cancer is simply nature's way of making you want to die.'Tatsu.

Barry Eisler

The day terrorists realize there acts unite us, they might switch places with Politicians.

Ketan Waghmare

It was 5:30 in the morning, and Wally’s coffee maker was just completing its automated process, yielding its much appreciated nectar for Richard’s consumption. He filled the biggest cup he could find two-thirds of the way up, and then opened the cabinet, selecting an espresso shot from the shelf. It proclaimed in bright red letters: “WARNING HIGH CAFFIENE. LIMIT 2 PER DAY”. Richard laughed a little as he dumped four of them into his coffee

Alexander Ferrick

Good luck is abnormalbad luck is common

Yarro Rai

There is no greater cruelty than a genius stumbling over something idiotic.

Friedrich Dürrenmatt

I always say a little prayer when I put cakes in the oven,” remarked Eve, as she stopped to kiss Rose good-bye.“What do you say?”“I say, ‘Please, God, don’t let me forget I’ve put that cake in the oven.

Hilary McKay

Irony? Irony can never be more than our own personal Maginot line; the drawing of it, for the most part, purely arbitrary.

Mark Z. Danielewski

Every misogynist came out of a woman.

Mat Johnson

It seemed ironic to her that women were considered far too meek for the morbidity of war, and yet a child could give their life in a battle they did not even understand.

Katlyn Charlesworth

Will 2015 ever be noted as the year Ebola was decisively downgraded from a lurid horror meme to just one of many commonly treatable diseases?

T.K. Naliaka

Look now—in all of history men have been taught that killing of men is an evil thing not to be countenanced. Any man who kills must be destroyed because this is a great sin, maybe the worst sin we know. And then we take a soldier and put murder in his hands and we say to him, ‘Use it well, use it wisely.’ We put no checks on him. Go out and kill as many of a certain kind or classification of your brothers as you can. And we will reward you for it because it is a violation of your early training.

John Steinbeck

Be extremely careful when using irony: bear in mind that irony might be an overture for sarcasm

Eraldo Banovac

A man may have ‘his moment,’ and that moment endure for decades, or only for the few seconds it takes for a bullet to travel across a courtyard to the balcony upon which he stands as he exhorts his people to follow him.

Ralph E. Vaughan

The whole justification for having such a bureaucratic system in the first place is so that balance is maintained, and so that one institution doesn't benefit at the expense of all others. Imagine the chaos that would ensue on Earth and in Hell if the Ministry of War were perpetually triumphant! Humans would be decimated and half of Hell would be out of a job.

Liz Williams

I'm always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both. Still, they have one thing I envy. Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die.

Markus Zusak

By keeping the price of treatment drugs artificially high, and making sure that only those who can afford it have the opportunity of a cure, we're actually supporting the work that the Ministry of Epidemics does. I mean, look at Africa and our liaison with the Underworld there.

Liz Williams

You know? Ain’t it ironic how we live our entire lives without the luxury of time, only to spend an eternity in death.

Jason Medina

There was one floor that was all gynecologists. They could tell by the remnants of weird optical contraptions- all the convoluted tools men use when they're searching for the source of their anxieties.

Carl Watson

Diamonds are intriscally worthless.

De Beers

Be extremely careful when using irony: bear in mind that irony might bean overture for sarcasm.

Eraldo Banovac

Jane, who is much better at reading guide books than I am (I always read them on the way back to see what I missed, it’s often quite a shock), discovered something wonderful in the book she was reading. Did I know, she asked, that Brisbane was originally founded as a penal colony for convicts who committed new offences after they had arrived in Australia ? I spent a good half hour enjoying this single piece of information. It was wonderful. There we British sat, poor grey sodden creatures, huddling under our grey northern sky that seeped like a rancid dish cloth, busy sending those we wished to punish most severely to sit in bright sunlight on the coast of the Tasman Sea at the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef and maybe do some surfing too. No wonder the Australians have a particular kind of smile that they reserve exclusively for use on the British.

Douglas Adams

For I must tell you, gentle reader, that Geralt the Witcher was always a modest, prudent and composed man, with a soul as simple and uncomplicated as the shaft of a halberd.

Andrzej Sapkowski

The universe loves irony even more than it loves futility.

Paul Russell

Mercy, how we do so often love to immortalize those despised and forgotten in life.

Timothy Beal

The old Televisions had an off switch.

Chris Bachelder

irony is for a traveler while traveling, happiness increases as the distance increases.

shivangi lavaniya

If consultants followed their own advice, they wouldn't tell anyone.

Grant McLachlan

Not every problem can be solved by you trying to get yourself killed.

Martha Wells

What’s fair and what’s true often bear no resemblance to each other.

Garon Whited

quoted Lewis Hyde, whose pamphlet on John Berryman and alcohol he had read in his early months at Granada House: “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage.” Then he continued: This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing….[I]rony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.

D.T. Max

The days are numbered for those bums over in England."German Tank commander

Leo McKinstry

Endgame,” Sam muttered, not really expecting Caine to hear.“Yep,” Caine said. “That’s right. Endgame. The FAYZ barrier is coming down; at least that’s mybet. But there’s also a ninety percent chance you and me both end up dead. Ten percent chance weboth actually get out of here alive. In which case we end up sharing a cell somewhere.” He laughed.“Kind of unfair, really, what with me being evil and all, and you just so darned virtuous and heroic.

Michael Grant

Inscriptions here of various Names I view'd,The greater part by hostile time subdu'd;Yet wide was spread their fame in ages past,And Poets once had promis'd they should last.

Alexander Pope

Every atom in your body spins and danceslike a bee around the queen,like a whirling dervish,like the stars spiraling in a galaxy.Yet why do you sit motionlessly watching Dancing With the Stars?

Khang Kijarro Nguyen

Once upon a time all the men of mind and genius in the world became of one belief- that is to say, of no belief. But it wearied them to think that within a few years after their death many cults and systems and prognostications would be ascribed to them which they had never...intended. So they said to one another: "Let's join together and make a great book that will last forever that will mock the credulity of man...We'll include all the most preposterous old wives' tales now current. We'll choose the keenest satirist alive to compile a deity from all the deities worshipped by mankind, a deity who will be more magnificent than any of them, yet so weakly human that he'll become a byword for laughter the world over- and we'll ascribe to him all sorts of jokes and vanities and rages, in which he'll be supposed to indulge for his own diversion, so that the people will read our book and ponder it, and there'll be no more nonsense in the world.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

imagine there's no heaven..." he said. "Apparently someone is taking that personally.

E.J. Copperman

You would compliment a coxcomb doing a good act, but you would not praise an angel.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our ability to measure and apportion time affords an almost endless source of comfort.“Synchronise watches at oh six hundred,” says the infantry captain, and each of his huddled lieutenants finds a respite from fear in the act of bringing two tiny pointers into jeweled alignment while tons of heavy artillery go fluttering overhead; the prosaic, civilian looking dial of the watch has restored, however briefly, an illusion of personal control. Good, it counsels, looking tidily up from the hairs and veins of each terribly vulnerable wrist; fine: so far, everything’s happening right on time…“Oh, let me see now,” says the ancient man, tilting his withered head to wince and blink at the sun in bewildered reminiscence, “my first wife passed away the spring of -” and for a moment he is touched with terror. The spring of what? Past? Future? What is any spring but a mindless rearrangement of cells in the crust of the spinning earth as it floats in endless circuit of its sun? What is the sun itself but one of a billion insensible stars forever going nowhere into nothingness? Infinity! But soon the merciful valves and switches of his brain begin to do their tired work, and “The spring of Nineteen-Ought-Six,” he is able to say. “Or no, wait-” and his blood runs cold again as the galaxies revolve. “Wait! Nineteen-Ought — Four.”… He may have forgotten the shape of his first wife’s smile and the sound of her voice in tears, but by imposing a set of numerals on her death, he has imposed coherence on his own life and on life itself… “Yes sir,” he can say with authority, “nineteen-Ought-Four,” and the stars tonight will please him as tokens of his ultimate heavenly rest. He has brought order out of chaos.

Richard Yates

There's always a 'she'. Isn't there?

Dennis Lehane

Wait!" said Erbrechen, suddenly feeling jovial. "I change my mind. Never shite again. Ever. Anywhere."It was a small thing, but of such small things were life's joys truly made. The thought, he knew, would keep him smiling for days."The world is a comedy, intoned Erbrechen, tittering, "and each must play his fart.

Michael R. Fletcher

Look, he's winding up the watch of his wit; by and by it will strike.

William Shakespeare

The biggest irony in the history of India is the term, "Muslim Personal Law."Law of the land could never be personal.

Ketan Waghmare

Once upon a time...long ago in a far-off place that everyone knows is not here or now or us.

Richard Flanagan

Irony can be tiresome when what you really need is a hug.

Helen Klein Ross

Those who meet objections to their forcing their religion on others with cries of 'Show respect!' clearly have no grasp of irony.

Christina Engela

Some two thousand stone-throwing protesters gathered in the street outside the school. They chanted, "We want fairness. There is no fairness if you don't let us cheat." It sounds like a joke, but they were absolutely serious.

Cathy O'Neil

He also said that he marvelled that among the Greeks, those who were skilful in a thing contend together; but those who have no such skill act as judges of the contest.

Diogenes Laërtius

Some irony. The girl who couldn't face her own bullshit . . . suddenly forcing everyone else to.

Rick Remender

Boy, these conservatives are really something, aren't they? They're all in favor of the unborn. They will do anything for the unborn. But once you're born, you're on your own. Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that, they don't want to know about you. They don't want to hear from you. No nothing. No neonatal care, no day care, no head start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you're preborn, you're fine; if you're preschool, you're fucked.

George Carlin

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Irony Quotes - Page 4

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