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“I must be overtired', Buttercup managed. 'The excitement and all.'
'Rest then', her mother cautioned. 'Terrible things can happen when you're overtired. I was overtired the night your father proposed.”
― William Goldman, The Princess Bride

“You know, you're rather amusingly wrong.”
― Terry Pratchett, Maskerade

“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 cleansed, roots dyed, eyelashes tinted, nails filed, cellulite massaged, stomach muscles exercised.

The whole performance is so highly tuned you only need to neglect it for a few days for the whole thing to go to seed. Sometimes I wonder what I would be like if left to revert to nature â€� with a full beard and handlebar moustache on each shin Dennis Healey eyebrows face a graveyard of dead skin cells spots erupting long curly fingernails like Struwelpeter blind as bat and stupid runt of species as no contact lenses flabby body flobbering around. Ugh ugh. Is it any wonder girls have no confidence?”
― Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones’s Diary

“God hides the fires of hell within paradise.”
― Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

“Your favorite virtue? An appreciation for irony.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“The most dangerous irony is, people are angry with others because of their own incompetence.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.”
― Lewis Hyde, Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking

“When Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that 'he may tarry,' we see the origin of every Jewish shrug from Spinoza to Woody Allen.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

“Luckily, even as a young man not yet become himself, John Bridgens had two things besides indecision that kept him from self-destruction - books and a sense of irony.”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“But that's men all over ... Poor dears, they can't help it. They haven't got logical minds.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Busman's Honeymoon

“Do you work for the government, any government?â€�
"I pay taxes, which means I work for the government, part of the time. Yes.”
― Roger Zelazny, My Name is Legion

“Ironic, isn’t it?â€� Shawn said.
“It’s not ironic at all,� Gus said.
“Dude, it’s so like a black fly in your chardonnay.�
“How many times do I have to tell you that’s not ironic, either?�
“Rain on your wedding day?�
“‘Irony� is the use of words to convey a meaning that’s opposite to their literal meaning,� Gus said. “That stupid song came out fourteen years ago, and we still have this exact conversation at least once a week.�
“Yeah,â€� Shawn said. “Ironic, isn’t it?”
― William Rabkin, A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Read

“The things that don't happen to us that we'll never know didn't happen to us. The nonstories. The extra minute to find the briefcase that makes you late to the spot where a tractor trailer mauled another car instead of yours. The woman you didn't meet because she couldn't get a taxi to the party you had to leave early from. All of life is a series of nonstories if you look at it that way. We just don't know what they are.”
― Anita Shreve

“We're not obsessed by anything, you see," insisted Ford.

"..."

"And that's the deciding factor. We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win."

"I care about lots of things," said Slartibartfast, his voice trembling partly with annoyance, but partly also with uncertainty.

"Such as?"

"Well," said the old man, "life, the Universe. Everything, really. Fjords."

"Would you die for them?"

"Fjords?" blinked Slartibartfast in surprise. "No."

"Well then."

"Wouldn't see the point, to be honest.”
― Douglas Adams

“Sometimes, you're the one who strikes it lucky. Sometimes, it's the other poor bastard who's left with the short straw, and you just have to shut up and get on with it.”
― M.L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans

“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 beachâ€� 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 historyâ€�. ‘It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itselfâ€�, he wrote in Untimely Meditations, ‘and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicismâ€�, in which ‘cosmopolitan fingeringâ€�, 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?

“There is no simple explanation for anything important any of us do, and the human tragedy, or the human irony, consists in the necessity of living with the consequences of actions performed under the pressure of compulsions so obscure we do not and cannot understand them.”
― Hugh MacLennan, The Watch that Ends the Night

“Irony - The modern mode: either the devil’s mark or the snorkel of sanity.”
― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

“There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life -- happiness, freedom, and peace of mind -- are always attained by giving them to someone else.”
― Peyton C. March

“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?”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Faithless: Tales of Transgression

“Even You-Know-Who can't split himself into seven.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“Goose neck is a delicacy. You have to at least try it. In fancy restaurants people pay up to fifty dollars a plate for this stuff.'
And at our house we were force-fed it for free. Just another irony of life.”
― Janette Rallison, All's Fair in Love, War, and High School

“to travel faster than a speeding bullet is not much help if you and it are heading straight towards each other”
― John Brunner, The Infinitive of Go

“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

“VLADIMIR: Moron!
ESTRAGON: Vermin!
VLADIMIR: Abortion!
ESTRAGON: Morpion!
VLADIMIR: Sewer-rat!
ESTRAGON: Curate!
VLADIMIR: Cretin!
ESTRAGON: (with finality). Crritic!
VLADIMIR: Oh!
He wilts, vanquished, and turns away.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“The 21st chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change.

----- "A Clockwork Orange Resucked" intro to first full American version 1986”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.”
― Mark Twain

“What do you take me for? That fool Socrates, who upheld the law at the cost of his own death â€� just to be ironic? I suspect that act was actually the result of his secret embarrassment of his hideous nose.”
― Benson Bruno, A Story that Talks About Talking is Like Chatter to Chattering Teeth, and Every Set of Dentures can Attest to the Fact that No . . .

“Sooner or later, all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do they truly revere Fat Man and Little Boy? I have been a visiting writer in several authoritarian and totalitarian states, and usually the question answers itself. Someone in a café makes an offhand remark. A piece of ironic graffiti is scrawled in the men's room. Some group at the university issues some improvised leaflet. The glacier begins to melt; a joke makes the rounds and the apparently immovable regime suddenly looks vulnerable and absurd. But it's almost impossible to convey the extent to which North Korea just isn't like that. South Koreans who met with long-lost family members after the June rapprochement were thunderstruck at the way their shabby and thin northern relatives extolled Fat Man and Little Boy. Of course, they had been handpicked, but they stuck to their line.

There's a possible reason for the existence of this level of denial, which is backed up by an indescribable degree of surveillance and indoctrination. A North Korean citizen who decided that it was all a lie and a waste would have to face the fact that his life had been a lie and a waste also. The scenes of hysterical grief when Fat Man died were not all feigned; there might be a collective nervous breakdown if it was suddenly announced that the Great Leader had been a verbose and arrogant fraud. Picture, if you will, the abrupt deprogramming of more than 20 million Moonies or Jonestowners, who are suddenly informed that it was all a cruel joke and there's no longer anybody to tell them what to do. There wouldn't be enough Kool-Aid to go round. I often wondered how my guides kept straight faces. The streetlights are turned out all over Pyongyang—which is the most favored city in the country—every night. And the most prominent building on the skyline, in a town committed to hysterical architectural excess, is the Ryugyong Hotel. It's 105 floors high, and from a distance looks like a grotesquely enlarged version of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco (or like a vast and cumbersome missile on a launchpad). The crane at its summit hasn't moved in years; it's a grandiose and incomplete ruin in the making. 'Under construction,' say the guides without a trace of irony. I suppose they just keep two sets of mental books and live with the contradiction for now.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“One notorious apikoros named Hiwa al-Balkhi, writing in ninth-century Persia, offered two hundred awkward questions to the faithful. He drew upon himself the usual thunderous cursesâ€�'may his name be forgotten, may his bones be worn to nothing'—along with detailed refutations and denunciations by Abraham ibn Ezra and others. These exciting anathemas, of course, ensured that his worrying 'questions' would remain current for as long as the Orthodox commentaries would be read. In this way, rather as when Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that 'he may tarry,' Jewishness contrives irony at its own expense. If there is one characteristic of Jews that I admire, it is that irony is seldom if ever wasted on them.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir