Irony Quotes - Page 21

• Rich people making their houses bigger in order to make their lives happier wind up hurting their own marriages. There's a deep irony here. Do the couples perceive that irony?

  Tucker Carlson

  Hurt, Couple, Wind

  "The Situation with" Tucker Carlson, January 12, 2006.

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• ... the irony of life is not that you cannot forget but that you can.

  Gertrude Atherton

  Life Is, Forget, Irony Of Life

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• That's the trouble with honorable mentions: they let everyone know you applied and didn't win.

  Nancy Mairs

  Winning, Trouble, Honorable

  Nancy Mairs (1994). “Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (woman) Writer”, Beacon Press (MA)

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• A careful blending of sarcasm, irony, and teasing, bickering has its own distinctive cadence and rhythm and is as difficult to master as French, Spanish, or any elective second language. Like Chinese, the fine points of bickering can be discerned in the subtle rise and fall of the voice. If not practiced properly, bickering can be mistaken for its less sophisticated counterpart: whining.

  Linda Sunshine

  Fall, Sarcasm, Voice

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• I am always impressed by the fact that even the tiniest amount of being listened to, the barest suggestion of the possibility of kind treatment, can bring such an immediate rush of emotion. I think this is because we are almost never really listened to. In my work as a psychologist, I am reminded every day of how infrequently we are heard, any of us, or our actions even marginally understood. And one of the ironies of my "listening profession" is its lesson that, in many ways, each of us ultimately remains a mystery to everyone else.

  Martha Stout

  Thinking, Listening, Suggestions

  Martha Stout, Ph.D. (2005). “The Sociopath Next Door”, p.141, Harmony

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• Irony has seeped into the felt of any fedora hat I have ever owned - not out of any wish of mine, but out of necessity. A fedora hat worn by me without the necessary protective irony would eat through my head and kill me.

  George W. S. Trow

  Wish, Fedoras, Hats

  George W. S. Trow (1981). “Within the Context of No Context”, p.119, Atlantic Monthly Press

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• I've always gravitated towards those ultimate lines in songs, the line you grab on to. That line in 'Smells Like Teen Spirit,' 'Here we are now/Entertain us' - the irony, the antagonism; that's always stuck with me.

  Corey Taylor

  Song, Smell, Lines

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• There's a lot of situations where I feel irony involved when R&B and hip-hop is expressed in the indie worlds. There's a lot of times when I feel like the juxtaposition becomes a thing.

  Solange Knowles

  Hip Hop, World, Juxtaposition

  "Solange Knowles On Nas, Juvenile And Dance Moves". "Microphone Check" with Ali Shaheed Muhammad, Frannie Kelley, www.npr.org. February 12, 2014.

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• Sometimes I think that no situation actually fits the technical definition of irony, and that the word just sort of hangs out in the linguistic ether singing a Siren song that's designed to crash the unsuspecting against the jagged rocks of pedantry.

  Mike Duncan

  Song, Thinking, Rocks

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• In the end, we know what makes us happy. We also know what makes us unhappy. That's the irony. We know and yet we still mess it up. That's part of the human condition, no, and why we need to work on it.

  Harlan Coben

  Unhappy, Needs, Ends

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• By an irony of fate, my first employment was as a draughtsman. I hated drawing; it was for me the very worst of annoyances. Fortunately, it was not long before I secured the position I sought, that of chief electrician to the telephone company.

  Nikola Tesla

  Fate, Drawing, Long

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• In the end, there is no absence of irony: the integrity of what is sacred to Native Americans will be determined by the government that has been responsible for doing everything in its power to destroy Native American cultures.

  Winona LaDuke

  Integrity, Native American, Government

  Winona LaDuke (2016). “Recovering the Sacred: The Power of Naming and Claiming”, p.10, Haymarket Books

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• Maggie Nelson cuts through our culture's prefabricated structures of thought and feeling with an intelligence whose ferocity is ultimately in the service of love. No piety is safe, no orthodoxy, no easy irony. The scare quotes burn off like fog.

  Ben Lerner

  Cutting, Fog, Feelings

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• Love, your own witch-daughter, Queen of the Mirror and the Highest Protector of Irony

  Jostein Gaarder

  Daughter, Queens, Love You

  Jostein Gaarder (2010). “Sophie's World”, p.421, Hachette UK

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• I am obsessed with story. I had a late awakening in life. In college was the first time that I understood what you could do with a story and what a good novel is - literary value and subtext and irony and everything.

  Shane Carruth

  College, Stories, Awakening

  "DVD Re-run Interview: Shane Carruth on “Primer”; The Lessons of a First-Timer". Interview with Wendy Mitchell, www.indiewire.com. April 18, 2005.

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• Writing itself, if not misunderstood and abused, becomes a way of empowering the writing self. It converts anger and disappointment into deliberate and durable aggression, the writer's main source of energy. It converts sorrow and self-pity into empathy, the writer's main means of relating to otherness. Similarly, his wounded innocence turns into irony, his silliness into wit, his guilt into judgment, his oddness into originality, his perverseness into his stinger.

  Ted Solotaroff

  Disappointment, Mean, Writing

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• Irony is the disparity between what you expect will happen, and what does happen. So raining on your wedding day isn't ironic, it's just crappy. It would have been ironic if she had lived in a place like Seattle, and traveled to the desert of Mexico for a wedding and it ended up raining there, but not in Seattle. Alanis always gets the last laugh though. We all sit here, saying her song isn't ironic, but in fact, that's pretty ironic that she wrote a song called Ironic that wasn't really ironic. Those Canadians are pretty crafty.

  Mo Rocca

  Song, Rain, Laughing

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• Woodrow Wilson is reported to have told a Princeton colleague, shortly after the 1912 election, "It would be an irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign problems, for all my preparation has been in domestic matters." In the event, Wilson's early months were marked by substantial domestic legislative accomplishment. Unfortunately, after Europe plunged into the Great War in August 1914, Wilson's leadership was uncertain.

  James M Strock

  War, Fate, Accomplishment

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• I am a writer and a feminist, and the two seem to be constantly in conflict.... ever since I became loosely involved with it, it has seemed to me one of the recurring ironies of this movement that there is no way to tell the truth about it without, in some small way, seeming to hurt it.

  Nora Ephron

  Hurt, Two, Feminist

  Nora Ephron (2012). “Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble: Some Things About Women and Notes on Media”, p.135, Vintage

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• By multiplying ironies, I evade commitments.

  Mason Cooley

  Commitment, Responsibility, Multiplying

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• Irony is to the high-bred what billingsgate is to the vulgar; and when one gentleman thinks another gentleman an ass, he does not say it point-blank, he implies it in the politest terms he can invent.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Thinking, Gentleman, Doe

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• One year, I'd completely lost my bearings trying to follow potty training instruction from a psychiatric expert. I was stuck on step on, which stated without an atom of irony: "Before you begin, remove all stubbornness from the child." . . . I knew it only could have been written by someone whose suit coat was still spotless at the end of the day, not someone who had any hands-on experience with an actual two-year-old.

  Mary Blakely

  Children, Two, Hands

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• Philosophy is the true home of irony, which might be defined as logical beauty: for wherever men are philosophizing in spoken or written dialogues, and provided they are not entirely systematic, irony ought to be produced and postulated; even the Stoics regarded urbanity as a virtue.

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Philosophy, Home, Men

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• I’m struck again by the irony that spaceflight-conceived in the cauldron of nationalist rivalries and hatreds-brings with it a stunning transnational vision. You spend even a little time contemplating the Earth from orbit and the most deeply engrained nationalisms begin to erode. They seem the squabbles of mites on a plum.

  Carl Sagan

  Hatred, Vision, Earth

  Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan (2011). “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space”, p.199, Ballantine Books

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• Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee and Tom Tancredo - those were the three guys who said they do not believe in evolution. The irony will be on them when their campaigns die off in favor of stronger, fitter campaigns.

  Bill Maher

  Believe, Guy, Stronger

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