… And I wondered if we had disappointed God so much, that he wrote us off as pets, just alive to entertain.

In order to grow, I promise you’ll have to let go of some habits. 10 times out of 10, they’ll be the habits you’re most in love with.

It is sometimes easier to be happy if you don’t know everything.

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...

I had never seen a real live dead person.

Being a woman is worse than being a farmer there is so much harvesting and crop spraying to be done: legs to be waxed, underarms shaved, eyebrows plucked, feet pumiced, skin exfoliated and moisturised, spots...

The robots came bearing a gift and the name of it was “Plenty.”Plenty is a habit-forming drug. You do not cut the dosage down. You kick it if you can; you stop the dose entirely....

Irony is just honesty with the volume cranked up.

Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour an serious...

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

Irony of the day: arthritis medication with a cap that old people can’t get off, because of their arthritis.

…one of the roles of man is to shut his eyes and keep them shut to see if he can continue into the night of his old age the dream curtailed in the night of...

The irony is, nothing is more frightening than being frightened.

You know,’ she begins, ‘you fellas ought to be looking after each other.’ Her comment makes me realise that through the lies, the greatest irony is that we are looking out for each other. It’s...

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

We give up our power to the very people who took it away from us in the first place.

I wonder if the highlighter was highlight of the career for the person who invented it?

… the novel, arguably the author’s best, had a disquieting power, like a sleeping crocodile.

I’m not scared of death, I just don’t want to seek it out.

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...

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.

Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it. -Andrew Young, author, civil rights activist, US congressman, mayor, and UN ambassador (b. 1932)

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.

Sarcasm.

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...

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...

In passing, we should note this curious mark of our own age: the only absolute allowed is the absolute insistence that there is no absolute.

I was much affected by the internal troubles of the Punch family; I thought that with a little more tact on the part of Mrs. Punch and some restraint held over a temper, naturally violent,...

Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a...

Life, here I come!’ he said. And was immediately and fatally run over by a bus.

Trapped. Sinking. Can’t be myself. Made into what other people expect. Is that everyone’s fate? Were the great individualists the products of their friends who wanted a great individualist as a friend?

You can put anything into words, except your own life

As soon as whatever provisional well of confidence dries up, I will feel like a frightened motherless child. And I will—what? Lessee, I’ll beg friends to assure me I’m fascinating, that my soul is complex...

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...

The newly-minted captain is told to let nothing stop him but to do nothing that would risk his ship or his crew.

God hides the fires of hell within paradise.

She walks in beauty.

That’s the nature of being a parent, Sabine has discovered. You’ll love your children far more than you ever loved your parents, and — in the recognition that your own children cannot fathom the depth...

The Lethean Library, for all its incalculable volumes, is, I know, sadly incomplete without Mr. Goodman’s effort.

People think that that being the winner is good,But sometimes the loser is the one that has the last laugh in the end.

I paid, got up, walkedto the door, openedit.I heard the mansay, “that guy’snuts.”out on the street Iwalked northfeelingcuriouslyhonored.

The hard core of morality and even of religion seems to me to be just what makes good comedy possible…Where there is no norm, nothing can be ridiculous, except for a brief moment of unbalanced...

(One character on another:)”Don’t you know that I passionately dote on every chin on his face?

If one cannot learn from the mistakes of others, one might as well become a Democrat.

Food is an important part of a balanced diet.

I’ll be your Dostoevsky, if you’ll be my Tolstoy. Our life together will be so full of despair that death will be like a gulag full of joy.

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...

I’m starting to feel like a character from one of these books

I live in my mind, such that whatever destroys me shall be a creature of my own invention.

Here was the world-famous novelist with her penchant for detail; yet, in her observations of a prostitute with a customer, she had failed to come away with the most important detail of all. She could...