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...

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?

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.

I have learned that I, we, are a dollar-a-day people (which is terrible, they say, because a cow in Japan is worth $9 a day). This means that a Japanese cow would be a middle...

She lived in fear of ifonic endings. (91)

We are dancing on our irony as upon the top of glowing sparks.

Our world will not die as the result of the bomb, as the papers say, it will die of laughter, of banality, or making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that.

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...

It’s the contradiction of life, if I were with them,I would only wish to be far away. Now that I am far away, all I do is wish for one more day surrounded by them

Maybe illusion and artifice—lies, even—are a necessary part of romance.

Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?”For fun?”Fun!’ He pounced on the word. ‘Words are for truth. For facts. Not fiction.

Chin up, and we’ll drown a little slower.

We always feel the brunt of the blow dealt to us, but hardly ever do we feel the impact we have on others. Why is that?

Mundane, boring stories–not interesting ones–are the ideal in an operating room.

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...