c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
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, Revolutionary Road
There's always a 'she'. Isn't there?
— Dennis Lehane, Shutter Island
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
You see, cancer is simply nature's way of making you want to die.'Tatsu.
— Barry Eisler, Extremis
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, HACK3R
Good luck is abnormalbad luck is common
— Yarro Rai
There is no greater cruelty than a genius stumbling over something idiotic.
— Friedrich Dürrenmatt, The Pledge
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, House of Leaves
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, The Patriot's Daughter
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, East of Eden
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, Amidst Dark Satanic Mills
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, The Book Thief
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, Snake Agent
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, A Ghost In New Orleans
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, Beneath The Empire Of The Birds
Diamonds are intriscally worthless.
— De Beers
Be extremely careful when using irony: bear in mind that irony might bean overture for sarcasm.
— Eraldo Banovac
He had the tendency, unfortunate for a new member of the committee, to like if not the rich themselves, at least their activities and surroundings, and to dislike the poor; a woman in rags toting a baby, barefoot children, made him feel sadistic rather than compassionate.His socialism, then, had the impatience and unfriendliness of a fashionable doctor forced to attend a tramp run over in the street.
— Hans Koningsberger
When did I start feeling so safe with him? I guess knowing that my friends wouldn’t set me up with some psycho criminal helps.
— Rene Webb, Finding Sunshine
When people say there is no place like home, the first to agree are the homeless.
— J.R. Rim, Write like no one is reading 2
The worst way to drown is in mainstream.
— J.R. Rim, Write like no one is reading 2
What each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.
— Friedrich Engels
The ironist is ironical not because he does not care, but because he cares too much.
— Randolph Bourne, The Radical Will: Selected Writings 1911-1918
Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn’t really hurt.
— George Bernard Shaw
Suddenly, she employed those very English weapons: devious good manners and a rapid change of subject.
— Patricia Duncker, Miss Webster and Chérif
TO MAKE A LONG STORY SHORTTo make a long story shortI leave all my possessionsto the Municipal Slaughterhouseto the Special Unit of the Police Departmentto Lucky Dog LottoSo now if you want you can shoot
— Nicanor Parra, Antipoems: How to Look Better and Feel Great
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, Popular Music and the New Auteur: Visionary Filmmakers After MTV
Everyone Deserves An Equal Footing.
— R.E. Conary, Life's a Bitch. So am I.
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, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
You say ‘cure.’ I hear ‘you’re not human enough.
— John Scalzi, Lock In
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, Foxglove Summer
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, Clouds among the Stars
How many times do I have to tell you? We are not gangsters!
— Peter Cimino, The Four Corners, a Sicilian Story
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
Either help or give up. Right now devil's advocate is just another name for asshole.
— James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes
Metaphysics in philosophy is, of course, supposed to characterize what is real - literally real. The irony is that such a conception of the real depends upon unconscious metaphors.
— George Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought
It is so hard to talk with John about my case, because he is so wise, and because he loves me so.
— Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper
This place is packed with beautiful hipsters. While the Coney Island bombast radiated sincerity, everything here seems more ironic. When someone in the crowd ironically chants, 'USA!' someone else ironically chants back, 'Mother Russia.
— Jon Ronson, Lost At Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries
Georgie, I've got it," she said. "I've guessed what it means."Now though Georgie was devoted to his Lucia, he was just as devoted to inductive reasoning, and Daisy Quantock was, with the exception of himself, far the most powerful logician in the place."What is it, then?" he asked."Stupid of me not to have thought of it at once," said Daisy. "Why, don't you see? Pepino is Auntie's heir, for she was unmarried, and he's the only nephew, and probably he has been left piles and piles. So naturally they say it's a terrible blow. Wouldn't do to be exultant. They must say it's a terrible blow, to show they don't care about the money. The more they're left, the sadder it is. So natural. I blame myself for not having thought of it at once...
— E.F. Benson, Lucia in London
The more people I am with, Dorrigo thought, the more alone I feel.
— Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North
John dear!" said I in the gentlest voice, "the key is down by the front steps, under a plantain leaf!"That silenced him for a few moments.Then he said—very quietly indeed, "Open the door, my darling!""I can't," said I. "The key is down by the front door under a plantain leaf!"And then I said it again, several times, very gently and slowly, and said it so often that he had to go and see, and he got it of course, and came in.
— Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper
Postmodern irony and cynicism's 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 postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years.
— David Foster Wallace
... the novel, arguably the author's best, had a disquieting power, like a sleeping crocodile.
— Roberto Bolaño
Marcus and Ellie exchanged a worried look and examined the bag again. Sure enough, the gold was gone.
— Justin Swapp, The Magic Shop
It has been said that civilization is the process of freeing human beings from each other, and that is true. But it takes people to free each other, because people cannot be freed from each other except by each other. The irony of this cannot be overstated.
— Robert Peate
I think you'll find that I'm qualified to deal with practically everything, if I choose. That last part, of course, is essential. --Devyn DuChien
— Chris Pavesic, The Caelimane Operation
Regretfully, but I have to admit that A. Einstein was right. -''Who?''. Oh, there was such a guy...
— Alexander Zalan
Sixty years of virginity tried in vain to dam the waters of instinct as they burst through the granite of good intentions,the rock of irreproachablee conduct.
— René Crevel, Putting My Foot in It
Frankly speaking, I'm not afraid of death. I don't endeavour to avert its advent. But I don't want to be a witness of it.
— Alexander Zalan
I got this to say. You're acting like a crowd of kids.
— William Golding
Psst"he called.The Cyclops lowered his hammer. He turned towards Zeus, but his one big eye had been staring into the flames so long that he couldn't see who was talking."I am not Psst"The Cyclops said " I am Brontes"Oh boy, Zeus thought. This may take a while
— Rick Riordan, Percy Jackson's Greek Gods
Sometimes, to fix something, you need to completely ruin something else
— Evan Gans
I wish I hadn't cried so much!" said Alice, as she swam about, trying to find her way out. "I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears! That will be a queer thing, to be sure! However, everything is queer today.
— Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass
The cave floor rumbled. A large stone emerged from the dirt-a smooth, oval rock exactly the same size and weight as a baby god... She wrapped the stone in swaddling clothes and gave the real baby Zeus to the nymphs to take care of... She marched right up to King Cannibal and shouted, "This is the best baby yet! A fine little boy named, uh, Rocky!
— Rick Riordan, Percy Jackson's Greek Gods
I hardly think that any Socialist, nowadays, would seriously propose that an inspector should call every morning at each house to see that each citizen rose up and did manual labour for eight hours.
— Oscar Wilde
And how is your head? Better?" he asked."Very much. Sometimes it hurts." Right now it was throbbing. "But every day I am much improved.""Where did you hit it? Are you bruised?"I put a hand to the back of my head, a little to the left, where I had landed with such jarring force. "Here," I said. "It's still a little tender."And leaning forward, he touched my hair right where I had just laid my hand. Such was he glamour that attended him that I expected the ache to instantly melt away, healed by his royal caress. But in fact, I felt a sudden leap in my heart that made the pain briefly more intense.
— Sharon Shinn, Summers at Castle Auburn
Kemp: I demonstrated conclusively this morning that invisibility--I.M: Never mind what YOU'VE DEMONSTRATED!--I'm starving, said the voice, and the night is--chilly for a man without clothes.
— H.G. Wells
I preyed on this sort of thing, discontentment, a clash of passions among the rivals, and the zealots. Open sores opened secrets. That’s how I roll.” Jackson Guild, The Trinity Conspiracy, Betrayal at Black Mesa
— Jeff Shear, The Trinity Conspiracy: Part One - Betrayal at Black Mesa
Irony is a gift of the gods, the most subtle of all the modes of speech. It is an armour and a weapon; it is a philosophy and a perpetual entertainment; it is food for the hungry of wit and drink to those thirsting for laughter...
— W. Somerset Maugham
When she was eighteen years old she had almost drowned in the Kennebec River, not because of the pummeling current, but because she couldn't come up with a casual phrase with which to call for rescue. "Help!" was such a cliche. By the time she was willing to scream, she had no breath left, and it was just blind luck that somebody saw her gasping and floundering and pulled her to shore. "Why didn't you say something?" they wanted to know, and she said, "I'm not a screamer." "Jesus," said one of them, "couldn't you have made an exception this one time?" "Apparently not," she said.
— Jincy Willett, Amy Falls Down
She trailed her fingers along the book spines as she wandered around the room. “My father thinks reading is a waste of time.” Hunter thought her father was a waste of space.
— Larissa Ione
Papa said that the parish priest in Abba was not spiritual enough. That was the problem with our people, Papa told us, our priorities were wrong; we cared too much about huge church buildings and mighty statues. You would never see white people doing that.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus
I actually feel quite self-indulgent at the moment, telling you all about me, me, me.(...) On the other hand, you're a human -you should understand self obsession.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
Political convictions then were of the utmost importance, so intensely felt that it was difficult even for well-balanced and temperate men to think of the opposition party without bitterness. To the rank and file of the Federalists, the Democrats seemed a vulgar, ignorant mob at best, at worst a group of "knaves and blockheads." To the Democrats, the Federalists appeared abandoned traitors fawning at the feet of the British government, a blindly selfish aristocracy who deserved little better treatment than the French nobility had received a few years before during the Reign of Terror.
— William Edward Buckley
The irony was not lost on any of us that despite the theme there was a robot on the throne.
— Kathryn Davis, Duplex
We can get you a throne with snakes. I’ll stand next to you and roar at anybody who fails to grovel. Fear Kate Daniels. She is a mighty and terrible ruler. Grendel can anoint the petitioners with his vomit. It’ll be great . . .
— Ilona Andrews, Magic Breaks
Life is full of little ironies, but it's also pockmarked with some the size of that big rock in Australia.
— Rick Yancey, The Infinite Sea
Her beauty was a weapon. A loaded gun, with the barrel pointed at her own head.
— Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
When you raise the most valid of points, you will be grazed by the most hollow of souls, and the most vacant of personages.
— Justin K. McFarlane Beau
Curley's wife lay with a half-covering of yellow hay. And the meanness and the plannings and the discontent and the ache for attention were all gone from her face. She was pretty and simple, and her face was sweet and young. Now her rouged cheeks and reddened lips made her seem alive and sleeping very lightly. The curls, tiny little sausages, were spread on the hay behind her head and her lips were parted
— John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
Diamond is the hardest substance, but the Irony, it is also brittle.
— Pushkar Saraf
...Jesus was only twelve years old. Jesus was learning the carpentry trade from his father.Two Roman soldiers came into the shop with a mechanical drawing on papyrus of a device they wanted built by sunrise the next morning. It was a cross to be used in the execution of a rabble-rouser.Jesus and his father built it. They were glad to have the work. And the rabble-rouser was executed on it.So it goes.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five
I've often heard it said, a preacherMight learn, with a comedian for a teacher.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
[sic] his reaction was a sign of civilization. Nobody reaches for a gun anymore, just for his lawyer.
— Peter F. Hamilton, Manhattan In Reverse
The newly-minted captain is told to let nothing stop him but to do nothing that would risk his ship or his crew.
— Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander
And now none of it could be undone. That was the exquisite irony: the act that had undone everything could not itself be undone.
— Paul Russell, The Coming Storm
I wonder if the highlighter was highlight of the career for the person who invented it?
— Ryan Lilly
Peace ain't worth fighting for.
— Brian Spellman, Cartoonist's Book Camp
All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don't really mean what I say." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it's impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it's too bad it's impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today's irony ends up saying: "How very banal to ask what I mean." Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like a hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its content is tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.This is why our educated teleholic friends' use of weary cynicism to try to seem superior to TV is so pathetic.
— David Foster Wallace, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction"
Peter, who broke his enemies on the rack and hanged them in Red Square, who had his son tortured to death, is Peter the Great. But Nicholas, whose hand was lighter than that of any tsar before him, is "Bloody Nicholas". In human terms, this is irony rich and dramatic, the more so because Nicholas knew what he was called.
— Robert K. Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra
I do love irony. It’s so…complicated and coincidental.
— Cassandra Kemper, The Madder Woman
We are dancing on our irony as upon the top of glowing sparks.
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
In spite of her superficial independence, her fundamental need was to cling.All her life was an attempt to disprove it; and so proved it. She was like a sea anemone -- had only to be touched once to adhere to what touched her.
— John Fowles, The Magus
I had made a friend. My second one in fourteen years. I was on a roll
— James Patterson, School's Out—Forever
God’s in His heaven—All’s right with the world!
— Robert Browning, Pippa Passes
Soon, she and the rest of them would be ironic much of the time, unable to answer an innocent question without giving their words a snide little adjustment. Fairly soon after that, the snideness would soften, the irony would be mixed in with seriousness, and the years would shorten and fly.
— Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings
He gave me a warm smile, and I blinked, realizing he was cute. I'd never really hadthe luxury of noticing cuteness or lack thereof in guys. Mostly it was the lethal/nonlethal distinction that I went with
— James Patterson, School's Out—Forever
In the grounds of the château was a churchsaid to date from the year 1000, and he went to look at it, but he had never really understood what people saw in oldchurches.
— Ken Follett, Fall of Giants
In the grounds of the château was a church said to date from the year 1000, and he went to look at it, but he had never really understood what people saw in old churches.
— Ken Follett, Fall of Giants
She feels "Brutal Dynasty" actually may become the Great American Novel she and her fellow critics have been looking for so long.
— Clyde Brion Davis, The Great American Novel
I would never dream of killing an excellent tailor, not even to keep a secret that could endanger my life.
— Charlie Huston, Sleepless
I'd know if I wasn't fully human, wouldn't I? Wouldn't there be some sort of sign, pointed ears or wings or something like that?--Meghan Chase
Maia screamed and woke. 'Serenity?' Cala's voice, Cala's angular shape outlined against the window. ' 'Tis an ironic title, in sooth,' Maia said feebly, realizing that the entangling garments of the nightmare were merely his bedsheets. His heart was hammering, and he was clammy with sweat.
— Katherine Addison, The Goblin Emperor
We must uncover our rituals for what they are: completely arbitrary things, tied to our bourgeois way of life; it isgood-and that is the real theater-totranscend them in the manner of play, bymeans of games and irony; it is good to be dirty and bearded, to have long hair,to look like a girl when one is a boy (and vice versa); one must put "inplay," show up, transform and reversethe systems which quietly order us about.
— Michel Foucault
Do you care for any contemporary authors?” Matthew inquired. “I adore Jane Austen.” Matthew nodded. “I find her portrait of British society so accurate and yet so dreadful.” “I agree. It must be awful to be so bound by what society expects,” Lisbeth answered. “I am so glad to have been born in America, where one has freedom.
— Laila Ibrahim, Yellow Crocus
You ought to give up detecting and try fantasy writing, Strike
— Robert Galbraith, The Cuckoo's Calling
Pretty average headlines for a worldwide catastrophe," Jane remarked as she read from Hollywood's Highest. "Some man in Africa claimed to have found the cure for AIDS, yet another politician said something about the president and now formally regrets it, and a pop star OD'd while an actress lost fifteen pounds overnight, and here's how you can, too!" She continued reading. "Oh, wow. The 'Celebrititties' section says she was in a car accident and her arms had to be amputated. Damn.
— Bryant A. Loney, Exodus in Confluence
Imagine a factory staffed by Alphas—that is to say by separate and unrelated individuals of good heredity and conditioned so as to be capable (within limits) of making a free choice and assuming responsibilities. Imagine it!
— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Funny, though, I don't feel too bad.
— Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
To condemn slavery was one thing—that I could do in my own individual heart—but female ministers!
— Sue Monk Kidd, The Invention of Wings
There is at least one advantage to being an Indonesian citizen: With this country's expanse of land and even greater expanse of sea, it's not difficult finding space for one's grave.
— Pramoedya Ananta Toer, The Mute's Soliloquy: a Memoir
Wouldn't it be ironic if everyone who got a radio up and running just sat around waiting for everyone else to transmit a message?
— Patricia Hamill, Fearless
The definition of irony - A Pope who refuses to give law enforcement the names of hundreds (or maybe thousands) of predatory homosexual pedophile priests around the world, then claiming that gay marriage will be the world's undoing. (Speaking of Benedict the XVI.)
— Dave Champion
Doakes had a first name! It was Albert - had anyone ever really called him that? Unthinkable. I had assumed his name was Sergeant.
— Jeff Lindsay, Dearly Devoted Dexter
I think this goes more to the idea of 'relentless irony' than 'divine providence.
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
But it was a matter of great consolation to her, that what brought evil to herself would bring good to her sister; and Elinor, on the other hand, suspecting that it would not be in her power to avoid Edward entirely, comforted herself by thinking, that though their longer stay would therefore militate against her own happiness, it would be better for Marianne than an immediate return into Devonshire.
— Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
Pretty average headlines for a worldwide catastrophe,” Jane remarked as she read from Hollywood's Highest. “Some man in Africa claimed to have found the cure for AIDS, yet another politician said something about the president and now formally regrets it, and a pop star OD'd while an actress lost fifteen pounds overnight, and here's how you can, too!” She continued reading. “Oh, wow. The 'Celebrititties' section says she was in a car accident and her arms had to be amputated. Damn.
— Bryant A. Loney
You ought to be ironical the minute you get out of bed. You ought to wake up with your mouth full of pity.
— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
It's funny how a person can be right all the time and still be wrong.
— Louis Sachar, Sideways Stories from Wayside School
VLADIMIR: Moron!ESTRAGON: Vermin!VLADIMIR: Abortion!ESTRAGON: Morpion!VLADIMIR: Sewer-rat!ESTRAGON: Curate!VLADIMIR: C
— Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
Oh - a diamond ring - and Rhett, do buy a great big one!
— Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
The next morning I had Twentieth-Century American Poetry at MCC. This old woman gave a lecture wherein she managed to talk for ninety minutes about Sylvia Plath without ever once quoting a single word of Sylvia Plath.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
Wrath: look at how their folklore portrays our species. There's Dracula for Christ's sake, an evil bloodsucker who preys on the defenseless. There's piss-poor B movies and porn. And don't get me started on the whole Halloween thing. Plastic fangs. Black capes. The only thing the idiots got right are that we drink blood and that we can't go out in daylight. The rest is bullshit, fabricated to alienate us and stimulate fear in the masses. Or just as offensive, the fiction used to create some kind of mystique for bored humans who think the dark side is a fun place to visit.
— J.R. Ward, Dark Lover
«Such is the irony of life,» Kruppe proclaimed, raising one pastry-filled hand over his head, «that one learns to distrust the obvious, surrendering instead to insidious suspicion and confused conclusion. But, is Kruppe deceived? Can an eel swim? Hurrah, these seeming muddy waters are home to Kruppe, and his eyes are wide with wonder.»
— Steven Erikson, Gardens of the Moon
Haw! Haw! Inconceivable stupidity is just what you're going to get! (Brigadier-General Henry Wilson, on being challenged in 1910 about the likelihood of a European war)
— Max Hastings, Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War
All of which does not alter the fact that Pnin was on the wrong train.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin
Crazy things seem normal, normal things seem crazy.
— Chuck Klosterman, Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas
monotony kills the heart. Ironically, monotony is what keeps the heart working.
— Soumeet Lanka
The Lethean Library, for all its incalculable volumes, is, I know, sadly incomplete without Mr. Goodman's effort.
— Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
What I'am learning is the world laughs through its ass every day, then just lies double-time when shit goes down. It's like we're on a Pritikin diet of fucken lies. I mean - what kind of fucken life is this?
— D.B.C. Pierre, Vernon God Little
There's no such thing as an ex-marine.
— EX-MARINES
You have to understand, having a good time is not my idea of having a good time.
— Anonymous
Acting is such a desperately futile profession anyway. Playing out the lives of other men. Knowing of their failures and successes long before they ever do. Living, suffering, murdering, dying … all in the space of three hours. Sometimes only two. And in such a confined little area. And over and over again every night. Can you imagine anything more perfectly stupid? Squeezing a whole existence into a measly evening’s entertainment on the stage? And not only that – in the middle of it all – pausing for an intermission. It makes one’s own life seem unbearably preposterous, doesn’t it?
— Morris Panych, 7 Stories
Ridiculous," he said breathlessly. "You ought to give up detecting and try fantasy writing.
— Robert Galbraith, The Cuckoo's Calling
O young girl, throw yourself again into the water so that I might have a second time the chance to save the two of us!" A second time, eh, what imprudence! Suppose, dear sir, someone actually took our word for it? It would have to be fulfilled. Brr...! the water is so cold! But let's reassure ourselves. It's too late now, it will always be too late. Fortunately!
— Albert Camus, The Fall
I hear Mr. Palmer tell Hannah that it was an electrical fault. Five arsonists in one school and it ends up being something so technically boring.
— Melina Marchetta, On the Jellicoe Road
Since ideology, particularly in it's shallower versions, is peculiarly destructive of the capacity to apprehend and appreciate irony, I suggest that the recovery of the ironic might be our fifth principle for the restoration of reading. ... But with this principle, I am close to despair, since you can no more teach someone to be ironic than you can instruct them to become solitary. And yet the loss of irony is the death of reading, and of what had been civilized in our natures.
— Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why
[Norm said,] 'To all those who argue this war is a mistake, I'd like to point out that we've removed from power one of history's most ruthless and belligerent tyrants. A man who cold-bloodedly murdered thousands of his own people. Who built palaces for his personal pleasure while schools decayed and his country's health care system collapsed. Who maintained one of the world's most expensive armies while he allowed his nation's infrastructure to crumble. Who channeled resources to his cronies and political allies, allowing them to siphon off much of the country's wealth for their own personal gain.
— Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
Irony is the attendant of hope and the fuel of hope is innocence.
— Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory
In sum, then a conservative tech writer offers a really attractive way of looking at viewer passivity and TV's institutionalization of irony, narcissism, nihilism, stasis. It's not our fault! It's outmoded technology's fault! If TV-dissemination were up to date, it would be impossible for it to "institutionalize" anything through its demonic "mass psychology"! Let's let Joe B., the little lonely guy, be his own manipulator or video-bits! Once all experience is finally reduced to marketable image, once the receiving user of user-friendly receivers can choose freely, Americanly, from an Americanly infinite variety of moving images hardly distinguishable from real-life images, and can then choose further just how he wishes to store, enhance, edit, recombine, and present those images to himself, in the privacy of his very own home and skull, TV's ironic, totalitarian grip on the American psychic cajones will be broken!"E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" (The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1993)
— David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again:  Essays and Arguments
...You know, one good apple can spoil the rest,” Colonel Korn concluded with conscious irony.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
General Peckem even recommends that we send our men into combat in full-dress uniform so they'll make a good impression on the enemy when they're shot down".
— Joseph Heller, Joseph Heller's Catch-22
«It's true, Christian-like or not; and is about as Christian-like as most other things in the world,» said Alfred.
— Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
Put something new on the table and everyone wants a piece of it.
— Naren Singh
Irony is a treacherous servant; unless it's very carefully watched over, it has a tendency to expose the foolishness of its apparent master.
— Mark O'Connell, Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever
I'll hide it on the Internet
— Taylor Young
1776: A declaration of the Parlement of Paris:The first rule of justice is to conserve for each individual that which belongs to him. This is a fundamental rule of natural law, human rights and civil government; a rule which consists not only in maintaining the rights of property, but also those rights vested in the individual and derived from prerogatives of birth and social position.
— Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety
And if a diversion is needed, why not arrest a general? Arthur Dillon is a friend of eminent deputies, a contender for the post of Commander-in-Chief of the Northern Front; he has proved himself at Valmy and in a halfdozen actions since. In the National Assembly he was a liberal; now he is a republican. Isn’t it then logical that he should be thrown into gaol, July 1, on suspicion of passing military secrets to the enemy?
— Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety
So your High Priest and Sacerdote propose to kill Death.” Edroc
— Christie Maurer, The Dark Lady's Stone
Lots of people wrote to the magazine to say that Marilyn vos Savant was wrong, even when she explained very carefully why she was right. Of the letters she got about the problem, 92% said that she was wrong and lots of these were from mathematicians and scientists. Here are some of the things they said: 'I'm very concerned with the general public's lack of mathematical skills. Please help by confessing your error.' -Robert Sachs, Ph.D., George Mason University ... 'I am sure you will receive many letters from high school and college students. Perhaps you should keep a few addresses for future columns.' -W. Robert Smith, Ph.D., Georgia State University... 'If all those Ph.D.'s were wrong, the country would be in very serious trouble.' -Everett Harman, Ph.D., U.S. Army Research Institute
— Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
In Russia, war will never be popular with the profound masses of people. Revolutionary ideas are more in their taste than a victory over Germany. But one does not escape one's destiny... - Russian Minister of the Interior, Nikolai Maklakov, on 29 July 1914.
— Nikolai Maklakov
I think the main function of contemporary irony is to protect thespeaker from being interpreted as naive or sentimental.
— David Foster Wallace
It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money.
— G.K. Chesterton, The New Jerusalem
How unfortunate, considering I have decided to loathe him for eternity
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
What one should add here is that self-consciousness is itself unconscious: we are not aware of the point of our self-consciousness. If ever there was a critic of the fetishizing effect of fascinating and dazzling "leitmotifs", it is Adorno: in his devastating analysis of Wagner, he tries to demonstrate how Wagnerian leitmotifs serve as fetishized elements of easy recognition and thus constitute a kind of inner-structural commodification of his music. It is then a supreme irony that traces of this same fetishizing procedure can be found in Adorno's own writings. Many of his provocative one-liners do effectively capture a profound insight or at least touch on a crucial point (for example: "Nothing is more true in pscyhoanalysis than its exaggeration"); however, more often than his partisans are ready to admit, Adorno gets caught up in his own game, infatuated with his own ability to produce dazzlingly "effective" paradoxical aphorisms at the expense of theoretical substance (recall the famous line from Dialectic of Englightment on how Hollywood's ideological maniuplation of social reality realized Kant's idea of the transcendental constitution of reality). In such cases where the dazzling "effect" of the unexpected short-circuit (here between Hollywood cinema and Kantian ontology) effectively overshadows the theoretical line of argumentation, the brilliant paradox works precisely in the same manner as the Wagnerian leitmotif: instead of serving as a nodal point in the complex network of structural mediation, it generates idiotic pleasure by focusing attention on itself. This unintended self-reflexivity is something of which Adorno undoubtedly was not aware: his critique of the Wagnerian leitmotif was an allegorical critique of his own writing. Is this not an exemplary case of his unconscious reflexivity of thinking? When criticizing his opponent Wagner, Adorno effectively deploys a critical allegory of his own writing - in Hegelese, the truth of his relation to the Other is a self-relation.
— Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times
So we came to say hello. To the world’s grouchiest person. Because that’s such fun.
— Molly Ringle, Persephone's Orchard
Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a ‘terminal beach’ was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsche’s most prescient pages are those in which he describes the ‘oversaturation of an age with history’. ‘It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself’, he wrote in Untimely Meditations, ‘and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism’, in which ‘cosmopolitan fingering’, a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche’s Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness.
— Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
I got mixed up with some oddness in my youth, and the long and short of it is that I can't shuffle off this mortal coil until I have read the ten most boring classics.
— Jasper Fforde, Lost in a Good Book
She talks about how she can't exercise because of the ailments-a bad back, sore knees, breathing difficulties-all caused by her weight gain.
— A.S. King, Everybody Sees the Ants
The worst thing about irony for me is that it attenuates emotion.
— David Foster Wallace
I come by my alarmism honestly. I have learned this custom over the years as I have settled into being a true New Yorker. This is how we welcome foreigners to our shores. Because we are so often frightened by living here, we are annoyed and offended when visitors fail to show the proper signs of terror. So we try to scare the living daylights out of them.
— David Rakoff, Fraud: Essays
Oh, I’m sorry. Did you want a fan club? You are right. I loved the movie, and you were perfect in it, you were absolutely amazing. Definitely Oscar material.
— Ani San, Breathe
Irony and hip ennui are extremely authoritarian.
— David Foster Wallace
Even in dying, a Thennanin ship was reputed to be not worth putting out of its misery. In battle they were slow, unmaneuverable—and as hard to disable permanently as a cockroach.
— David Brin, Startide Rising
Royal Young's writing is that rare blend of irony and beauty.
— Simon Van Booy, Everything Beautiful Began After
I scrupulously hide every legitimate reason for people to hate me, and it turns out they don’t need legitimate reasons. Heaven has fashioned a knife of irony to stab me with.
— Rachel Hartman, Seraphina
Assumptions are unopened windows that foolish birds fly into, and their broken bodies are evidence gathered too late.
— Bryan Davis, Liberator
How much truth is contained in something can be best determined by making it thoroughly laughable and then watching to see how much joking around it can take. For truth is a matter that can withstand mockery, that is freshened by any ironic gesture directed at it. Whatever cannot withstand satire is false.
— Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason
Acceptable hypocrisy is often called politeness.
— Shannon L. Alder
My mind went back to that picture in the obstetrics book. A cow standing in the middle of a gleaming floor while a sleek veterinary surgeon in a spotless parturition overall inserted his arm to a polite distance. He was relaxed and smiling, the farmer and his helpers were smiling, even the cow was smiling. There was no dirt or blood or sweat anywhere.That man in the picture had just finished an excellent lunch and had moved next door to do a bit of calving just for the sheer pleasure of it, as a kind of dessert. He hadn't crawled shivering from his bed at two o'clock in the morning and bumped over twelve miles of frozen snow, staring sleepily ahead till the lonely farm showed in the headlights. He hadn't climbed half a mile of white fell-side to the doorless barn where his patient lay.
— James Herriot, If Only They Could Talk
I live in my mind, such that whatever destroys me shall be a creature of my own invention.
— Genevieve Ross
I am beginning to believe that nothing is quite so uncertain as facts. (Edward Curtis)
— Timothy Egan, Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis
He smelled the smells of commerce and listened to the cursing of the sailors, both of which he admired: the former, as it reeked of wealth, and the latter because it combined his two other chief preoccupations, these being theology and anatomy.
— Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light
The pages of history are red with the blood of illuminated "saints" who were murdered by their religions for actually achieving the advertised spiritual rewards.
— Christopher S. Hyatt, Sex Magic, Tantra & Tarot: The Way of the Secret Lover
Most people willingly deceive themselves with a doubly false faith; they believe in eternal memory (of men, things, deeds, peoples) and in rectification (of deeds, errors, sins, injustice). Both are sham. The truth lies at the opposite end of the scale: everything will be forgotten and nothing will be rectified. All rectification (both vengeance and forgiveness) will be taken over by oblivion.
— Milan Kundera, The Joke
I’m not sure how people drink out of skulls,” Jinx added. Calvin had too many holes in him to make a good cup.
— Sage Blackwood, Jinx
You're worse than decent. You're virtuous.
— Eugene O'Neill
I still couldn't imagine that she was really, truly pregnant; maybe this was an hysterical pregnancy. But Sarah was never hysterical. Enthusiastic, yes, ironic on occasion. I couldn't imagine a doctor saying, "No, it's just an ironic pregnancy.
— James Lileks, Falling Up the Stairs
The blessing of the omnivore is that he can eat a great many different things in nature. The curse of the omnivore is that when it comes to figuring out which of those things are safe to eat, he's pretty much on his own.
— Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
You cut life to pieces with your epigrams.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray