I am beginning to believe that nothing is quite so uncertain as facts. (Edward Curtis)

… 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...

There is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.

The funny thing is if in England, you ask a man in the street who the greatest living Darwinian is, he will say Richard Dawkins. And indeed, Dawkins has done a marvelous job of popularizing...

Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life’s cruelest irony.

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...

It was growing late, and though one might stand on the brink of a deep chasm of disaster, one was still obliged to dress for dinner.

There are elements of irony in my work, of course.

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.

It’s funny how a person can be right all the time and still be wrong.

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...

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...

A DEAD STATESMANI could not dig: I dared not rob:Therefore I lied to please the mob.Now all my lies are proved untrueAnd I must face the men I slew.What tale shall serve me here amongMine...

I don’t want to hurt anyone” Laszlo fiddled with a button on his tux jacket. “Can’t we convince the CIA that some of us are peaceful?” “we’ll have to try” Angus folded his arms across...

It wasn’t long after the discovery of modern anesthesia that people began to die of it.

The more people I am with, Dorrigo thought, the more alone I feel.

The Cinderella story in reverse. I only wish there were ashes in the fireplace so I could order you to sweep them out.

Are we not all actors playing parts in another person’s play?

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.

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...

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...