John Wesley’s own grave holds the bones of many other people, including at least five ministers. One can only imagine the bickering.

I think the main function of contemporary irony is to protect thespeaker from being interpreted as naive or sentimental.

Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.

Nobody can tell what I suffer! But it is always so. Those who do not complain are never pitied.

They had supported him … for freedom’s sake, they would have said; meaning as do all men who mouth that catchword, freedom for themselves and their own class.

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...

Irony serves as an alibi for a fetish.

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)

The beauty and mystery of this world only emerges through affection, attention, interest and compassion . . . open your eyes wide and actually see this world by attending to its colors, details and irony.

And yet Praecursoris is not punished the same way, only because it is not practical, and he is needed for breeding?

Nobody steals books but your friends.

How queerly they dress!

Words were his delight; Hers, a gay gracefulnessOf dancing and moving. But when to the place Of deep loving (Starlight at midnight)At last they came, Their full communion And consummation,Their complete sphere,Was stillness for her,Silence...

He led them around the base of a great fallen tree whose exposed roots resembled more than anything else a huge broom – a broom that would have fired the imagination of Rachel the Dragon...

And yet sometimes we become the person we most dread. Or maybe we dread most the person we know we are to become.

The only problem i had with literature that I simply couldn’t figure out was that the correct answer was the first thing that comes to your mind after reading the question, the most obvious one....

Captain Smek himself appeared on television for an official speech to humankind. […] ‘Noble Savages of Earth,’ he said. ‘Long time we have tried to live together in peace.’ (It had been five months.) ‘Long...

De conversatie wordt soms pas echt levendig en hartelijk als de gasten weer op de gang staan om hun jas aan te trekken.

He’s living in a time warp. The great irony is Bush inherited the strongest presidency of anyone since Franklin Roosevelt, and Cheney acts as if he’s still under the constraints of 1973 or 1974.

Indeed it may be said with some confidence that the average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. There are moments when his cogitations are relatively more respectable than usual, but...

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...

So through a world of piety I made my way to Sebastian.

I had a dream I was a samurai who invented the poncho, and I sold my ponchos to Mexico. The irony is… I invented them for women.

Die? I should say not, dear fellow. No Barrymore would allow such a conventional thing to happen to him.

It’s the irony of war. Those who want to live, die. Those who want to die, live on.

I’m sick of the ignorance that lack of funding has generated, of the fathers who apporach me at dinner parties with their four-year-old girls clasped to their pant legs and say, “Yeah, but studies say...

A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?

Hay quienes dicen que, de ser rubia, podría hacer de Bridges Jones sin problemas. Deben estar bromeando, porque nunca he preparado una sopa azul

He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.

Irony is wasted on the stupid

A graduation ceremony is an event where the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that “individuality” is the key to success.

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...

To be depressed or neurotic is passive. It has happened to all of us; we are its victims, are we have no control over it.

And it’s really very difficult to kill someone when all your inner instincts would oblige you to take off your hat first!

Acceptable hypocrisy is often called politeness.

He himself, Anthony went on to think, he himself had chosen to regard the whole process as either pointless or a practical joke. Yes, chosen. For it had been an act of the will. If...

Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque...

Some [jests] are becoming to a gentleman, others are not; see that you choose such as become you. Irony better befits a gentleman than buffoonery; the ironical man jokes to amuse himself, the buffoon to...

That’s the difference between irony and sarcasm. Irony can be spontaneous, while sarcasm requires volition. You have to create sarcasm.

The American white relegates the black to the rank of shoeshine boy; and he concludes from this that the black is good for nothing but shining shoes.

I don’t think irony’s meant to synergize with anything as heartfelt assadness.

As a rule,I believe people shouldn’t follow rules;rules should follow people.

Whatever we may think of the merits of torturing children for pleasure, and no doubt there is much to be said on both sides, I am sure we all agree that it should be done...

Irony takes nothing away from pathos.

But there was no going back to that idyllic time when only one god wanted to kill me.

The rich and the poor truly are from different realms: one has adapted to become an expert in material forfeit; the other has forfeited all they are to material, and thus is enslaved, by it.

Put a tiger on your tank

…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...

I feel real bad for Marc-Andre. He did a great job. You could say there’s a bitter irony in this.

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...