122 Quotes On Irony

Irony is a literary device that has fascinated readers and thinkers for centuries. It unveils the nuanced beauty and complexity within language, offering a mirror to the contradictions and unexpected twists of life. Whether you find humor in its subtlety or profundity in its depth, irony enriches our understanding of the world and challenges our perceptions. In this collection of the top 122 quotes on irony, you'll encounter insights from renowned authors, philosophers, and cultural critics whose words capture the multifaceted nature of irony. Prepare to delve into a world where expectations are upended and truths are revealed in surprising ways.

1. “Maugham then offers the greatest advice anyone could give to a young author: "At the end of an interrogation sentence, place a question mark. You'd be surprised how effective it can be.” - Woody Allen

2. “Thank you for sending me a copy of your book. I'll waste no time reading it.” - Moses Hadas

3. “The ballot is stronger than the bullet.” - Abraham Lincoln

4. “Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,a medley of extemporanea,And love is a thing that can never go wrong,and I am Marie of Romania.” - Dorothy Parker

5. “That will do extremely well, child. You have delighted us long enough. Let the other young ladies have time to exhibit.” - Jane Austen

6. “Mr. Bennet, how can you abuse your own children in such a way? You take delight in vexing me. You have no compassion for my poor nerves."You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. Theyare my old friends. I have heard you mention them with considerationthese last twenty years at least.” - Jane Austen

7. “Nothing goes so well with a hot fire and buttered crumpets as a wet day without and a good dose of comfortable horrors within. The heavier the lashing of the rain and the ghastlier the details, the better the flavour seems to be.” - Dorothy L. Sayers

8. “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

9. “Nay, but prithee, with sprinkles 'pon it instead," I said solemnly, "and frosting of white.” - Jim Butcher

10. “The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues....[But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings.” - Haruki Murakami

11. “I'm not scared of death, I just don't want to seek it out.” - Tommy Higgins

12. “Don’t underestimate the value of irony—it is extremely valuable.” - Henry James

13. “Food is an important part of a balanced diet.” - Fran Lebowitz

14. “I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky

15. “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

16. “In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.” - Mark Twain

17. “A graduation ceremony is an event where the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that "individuality" is the key to success.” - Robert Orben

18. “Human nature is pretty shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.” - Peter Devries

19. “That's the difference between irony and sarcasm. Irony can be spontaneous, while sarcasm requires volition. You have to create sarcasm.” - Christopher Moore

20. “What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.” - Robert Hughes

21. “[...] cela m'excite de penser à tout ce qui fuit dans la vie au nom de la vie.” - Nicole Brossard

22. “I quote others only in order the better to express myself.” - Michel de Montaigne

23. “During the first day, curious at having outsiders among them, a long stream of inmates came over and talked with me. Remarkably, according to what they told me, nearly every inmate in the prison didn't do it. Several thousand people had been locked up unjustly and, by an incredible coincidence, all in the same prison.On the other hand, they knew an awful lot about how to knife somebody.” - Alan Alda

24. “He gave me the key, which I later discovered would open practically every door in the hotel. I thanked him, and I made a small mistake we irony collectors often make: I tried to share an irony with a stranger. It can’t be done. I told him I had been in the Arapahoe before—in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one. He was not interested. ” - Kurt Vonnegut

25. “Do you work for the government, any government?”"I pay taxes, which means I work for the government, part of the time. Yes.” - Roger Zelazny

26. “Scriptures, n. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.” - Ambrose Bierce

27. “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

28. “People often say that the English are very cold fish, very reserved, that they have a way of looking at things – even tragedy – with a sense of irony. There’s some truth in it; it’s pretty stupid of them, though. Humor won’t save you; it doesn’t really do anything at all. You can look at life ironically for years, maybe decades; there are people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end, life always breaks your heart. Doesn’t matter how brave you are, how reserved, or how much you’ve developed a sense of humor, you still end up with your heart broken. That’s when you stop laughing. In the end there’s just the cold, the silence and the loneliness. In the end, there’s only death.” - Michel Houellebecq

29. “Irony - The modern mode: either the devil’s mark or the snorkel of sanity.” - Julian Barnes

30. “Now it turns out that a few broadsheet film critics in Britain do indeed belong to a category of people who would have resisted Hitler when he came to power. So the great shame is, clearly film critics should have been running Austria at the time, because Hitler would have represented no problem to them at all. [The Guardian's] Peter Bradshaw would have known exactly what to do, and he would not have been remotely fallible to any Nazi who threatened his life. No, he would have died in heroic acts of individual resistance. So it's a privilege to live among people who enjoy such moral certainty.” - David Hare

31. “Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blasé ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosphere of great days … the region of pure poetry.” - Charles Baudelaire

32. “She was heartily ashamed of her ignorance - a misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well−informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.” - Jane Austen

33. “Whatever we may think of the merits of torturing children for pleasure, and no doubt there is much to be said on both sides, I am sure we all agree that it should be done with sterilized instruments.” - G.K. Chesterton

34. “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

35. “A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.” - Leszek Kolakowski

36. “Look, Laszlo. I'll have the dentist with me, and I don't want to alarm her any more than necessary. So take Vanna out of the backseat and stick her in the trunk."Shanna halted. Her mouth dropped open. Her throat seized up, making it hard to breathe.I don't care how much crap you have in the trunk. We're not driving around with a naked body in the car."Oh no! She gasped for air. He was a hit man.” - Kerrelyn Sparks

37. “Anyway, I'm in bed with her, with her bracelets. Her face is a blank, so I darken the lights. Off go her silky undergarments. The bracelets are all she has on. They glint slightly, a pleasant muffled clinking on the sheets. I have a hard-on.Which, halfway down the ladder, is what I noticed. Just great. Why now? Why didn't I get an erection when I needed one? And why was I getting so excited over two lousy bracelets? Especially under this slicker, with the world about to end.” - Haruki Murakami

38. “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.” - Georgette Heyer

39. “When I'm 33, I quit.” - Mick Jagger

40. “Your favorite virtue? An appreciation for irony.” - Christopher Hitchens

41. “It is the oldest ironies that are still the most satisfying: man, when preparing for bloody war, will orate loudly and most eloquently in the name of peace.” - Alan Moore

42. “Irony is Fate's most common figure of speech.” - Trevanian

43. “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.” - Lewis Hyde

44. “To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and all those guys, "I wish I had known this some time ago.” - Roger Zelazny

45. “If one cannot learn from the mistakes of others, one might as well become a Democrat.” - Esther M. Friesner

46. “Don't you know that I passionately dote on every chin on his face?” - Dorothy L. Sayers

47. “You could write a book about things that you can't find on-line.” - Maggie Stiefvater

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

49. “Pedersen was always wooing her. Sometimes he was gracious and kind, but at other times when his failure wearied him he would be cruel and sardonic, with a suggestive tongue whose vice would have scourged her were it not that Marie was impervious, or too deeply inured to mind it. She always grinned at him and fobbed him off with pleasantries, whether he was amorous or acrid.'God Almighty,' he would groan, 'she is not good for me, this Marie. What can I do for her? She is burning me alive and the Skaggerack could not quench me, not all of it. The devil! What can I do with this? Some day I shall smash her across the eyes, yes, across the eyes.' So you see the man really loved her.("The Tiger")” - A.E. Coppard

50. “The cinema is an invention without any future.” - Louis Lumière

51. “to travel faster than a speeding bullet is not much help if you and it are heading straight towards each other” - John Brunner

52. “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 class Kenyan... a $9-a-day cow from Japan could very well head a humanitarian NGO in Kenya. Massages are very cheap in Nairobi, so the cow would be comfortable.” - Binyavanga Wainaina

53. “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.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

54. “Suddenly the thought that the end of her life was imminent shocked him; it was one thing to pity someone he didn't know, quite another to face the same dilemma with someone he knew intimately. That was the trouble with beds. They turned strangers into intimates more quickly than ten years of polite teas in parlours.” - Colleen McCullough

55. “I pound on the glass, screaming my head off. Everyone ignores me except for some Capitol attendant who appears behind me and offers me a beverage.” - Suzanne Collins

56. “So such is life that it writes itself, trying to right itself, but there's nothing wrong with it.” - Robert Pollard

57. “Imagine the wizened quality of a life blanched of contradiction and double standard.p 44” - Michael Perry

58. “I'm a survivor, " I said. But I didn't think that claim would carry much weight in an obituary.” - Tobias Wolff

59. “You don’t need a plan. You have the Puck with you, remember? I’m an expert at this. And I’ve never needed an elaborate plan to pull anything off.”...“Worry not, human,” the cat sighed, giving himself a thorough shake. “I am going with you as well. With Goodfellow’s exemplary planning, someone has to make sure you go through the right door.” - Julie Kagawa

60. “Just to keep the bad dreams at bay, she took a swig out of a bottle that smelled of apples and happy brain-death.” - Terry Pratchett

61. “Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

62. “It would be dreadfullyironic, I mused, if once I earned a soul, I forgot everything about being fey, including all my memories of her. That sort of ending seemedappropriately tragic; the smitten fey creature becomes human but forgets why he wanted to in the first place. Old fairy tales loved that sort of irony.” - Julie Kagawa

63. “What tale do you like best to hear?' 'Oh, I have not much choice! They generally run on the same theme - courtship; and promise to end in the same catastrophe - marriage.” - Charlotte Brontë

64. “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)” - Andrew Young

65. “[Or perhaps my friends should have realized that they shouldn't have left behind the FRICKING REASON FOR THEIR PROTEST!And that thought just cracked me up.]It was like my friends had walked over the backs of baby seals in order to get to the beach where they could protest against the slaughter of baby seals.” - Sherman Alexie

66. “Even You-Know-Who can't split himself into seven.” - J.K. Rowling

67. “Maybe illusion and artifice—lies, even—are a necessary part of romance.” - Jody Gehrman

68. “Salcombe Hardy groaned: "How long, O Lord, how long shall we have to listen to all this tripe about commercial arsenic? Murderers learn it now at their mother's knee.” - Dorothy L. Sayers

69. “The fool's crime is the crime that is found out and the wise man's crime is the crime that is not found out.” - Wilkie Collins

70. “So if there is something on the planet that is worth living for, I'd better not miss it, because once you're dead, it's too late for regrets, and if you die by mistake, that is really, really dumb.” - Muriel Barbery

71. “It might seem to you that living in the woods on a riverbank would remove you from the modern world. But not if the river is navigable, as ours is. On pretty weekends in the summer, this riverbank is the very verge of the modern world. It is a seat in the front row, you might say. On those weekends, the river is disquieted from morning to night by people resting from their work.This resting involves traveling at great speed, first on the road and then on the river. The people are in an emergency to relax. They long for the peace and quiet of the great outdoors. Their eyes are hungry for the scenes of nature. They go very fast in their boats. They stir the river like a spoon in a cup of coffee. They play their radios loud enough to hear above the noise of their motors. They look neither left nor right. They don't slow down for - or maybe even see - an old man in a rowboat raising his lines...I watch and I wonder and I think. I think of the old slavery, and of the way The Economy has now improved upon it. The new slavery has improved upon the old by giving the new slaves the illusion that they are free. The Economy does not take people's freedom by force, which would be against its principles, for it is very humane. It buys their freedom, pays for it, and then persuades its money back again with shoddy goods and the promise of freedom.” - Wendell Berry

72. “She'd been a good nurse, and now she'd never be a nurse again. She was bitter about it and had turned herself into the slut bride from Planet X, as if even in human form, she wanted people to know what she was now: different, other. Trouble was, she looked like a thousand other teens and early twenties who also wanted to be different and stand out.” - Laurell K. Hamilton

73. “Now that’s true poetic irony. I rush into battle to defend the fair name of Rose Larkin, and what does she do but fetch Robert to stop me.” - Franny Billingsley

74. “There are few things more mysterious than endings. I mean, for example, when did the Greek gods end, exactly? Was there a day when Zeus waved magisterially down from Olympus and Aphrodite and her lover Ares, and her crippled husband Hephaestus ) I always felt sorry for him), and all the rest got rolled up like a worn-out carpet?” - Salley Vickers

75. “...it’s just another one of those things I don’t understand: everyone impresses upon you how unique you are, encouraging you to cultivate your individuality while at the same time trying to squish you and everyone else into the same ridiculous mould. It’s an artist’s right to rebel against the world’s stupidity.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

76. “LIII.What is the holiness of conversation? It isto master death.” - Anne Carson

77. “The worst mistake a writer can make is to assume everyone has an imagination.” - Andrew McEwan

78. “Gods can screw anything and anybody. For reference, see history.Atticus O'Sullivan” - Kevin Hearne

79. “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

80. “Scary discovery of the day: Most people who RT @yokoono's tweets do so without irony.” - James Taranto

81. “Somewhere fate laughs in her far-off country, because now I am the human and it is Grace I will lose again and again, immer wieder, always the same, every winter, losing more of her each year, unless I find a cure.” - Maggie Stiefvater

82. “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 just that in the end, we're letting her down. That's what injures us.” - Markus Zusak

83. “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

84. “It would be the last thing he did if he beat my dog.” - Holly Hood

85. “I have associated myself with failed scientists in order to associate myself with failed irony. ("Metier: Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka")” - William S. Wilson

86. “Poets speak of hope in ladies smiles, but give me a smirk any day, I say.” - Lois McMaster Bujold

87. “During voir dire, the interviews for jury selection, each person is asked under oath about their experience with the criminal justice system, as defendant or victim, but usually not even the most elementary effort is made to corroborate those claims. One ADA [Associate District Attorney] told me about inheriting a murder case, after the first jury deadlocked. He checked the raps for the jurors and found that four had criminal records. None of those jurors were prosecuted. Nor was it policy to prosecute defense witnesses who were demonstrably lying--by providing false alibis, for example--because, as another ADA told me, if they win the case, they don't bother, and if they lose, "it looks like sour grapes." A cop told me about a brawl at court one day, when he saw court officers tackle a man who tried to escape from the Grand Jury. An undercover was testifying about a buy when the juror recognized him as someone he had sold to. Another cop told me about locking up a woman for buying crack, who begged for a Desk Appearance Ticket, because she had to get back to court, for jury duty--she was the forewoman on a Narcotics case, of course. The worst part about these stories is that when I told them to various ADAs, none were at all surprised; most of those I'd worked with I respected, but the institutionalized expectations were abysmal. They were too used to losing and it showed in how they played the game.” - Edward Conlon

88. “As soon as they leave, Leon says to me: "I disagree, sir. There are people who aren't insane, and I'm one of them. People who generalize are mentally ill.” - Milton Rokeach

89. “Religious people were big on saying "the tongue is a mighty weapon, so use it wisely," and then forsaking this claim when the music director slept with the minister's wife or when the youth minister did what he did.” - Tiffany King

90. “He expects us to kill him," Palomides said to Dinadan."Some people are so demanding," Dinadan replied. "Considering we've only just met, I mean.” - Gerald Morris

91. “Seven pillars of wisdom propping the roof of the temple. Always remember what there's beyond the pillars.” - Lara Biyuts

92. “I am not going to give you disclaimers about what you can expect to find in my story. I went through menopause recently and find I don't much care about anyone's sensibilities anymore. I am called BadSquirrel for a reason. Considering how incredibly rude and grouchy I have become, I expect all of you to be extremely grateful to the QMBG (Queen Mother Bitch Goddess for those of you who haven't kept up) for all of the good warm fuzzy bits of my story. If you like it, it's because she went through it and took out all the really disturbing parts and made me behave.” - BadSquirrel

93. “Irony of the day: arthritis medication with a cap that old people can't get off, because of their arthritis.” - Kelli Jae Baeli

94. “Don't we all hope to die with a smile on our faces?” - Jeff O'Brien

95. “Now, as I understand it, the bards were feared. They were respected, but more than that they were feared. If you were just some magician, if you'd pissed off some witch, then what's she gonna do, she's gonna put a curse on you, and what's gonna happen? Your hens are gonna lay funny, your milk's gonna go sour, maybe one of your kids is gonna get a hare-lip or something like that — no big deal. You piss off a bard, and forget about putting a curse on you, he might put a satire on you. And if he was a skilful bard, he puts a satire on you, it destroys you in the eyes of your community, it shows you up as ridiculous, lame, pathetic, worthless, in the eyes of your community, in the eyes of your family, in the eyes of your children, in the eyes of yourself, and if it's a particularly good bard, and he's written a particularly good satire, then three hundred years after you're dead, people are still gonna be laughing, at what a twat you were.” - Alan Moore

96. “The Emperor, you see, protects... He protects mankind, through the Legions, through the Martial corps, through the war machines of the Mechanicum. He understands the dangers. The inconsistencies. He uses you, and all the instruments like you, to protect us from harm. To protect our physical bodies from murder and damage, to protect our minds from madness, to protect our souls... There are insane dangers in the cosmos, dangers that mankind is fundamentally unable to comprehend, let alone survive. So he protects us. There are truths out there that would drive us mad by one fleeting glimpse of them. So he chooses not to share them with us. That's why he made you... Remember, Garviel. The Emperor is our truth and out light. If we trust in him, he will protect.” - Dan Abnett

97. “... a man doesn't like to have his ego popped, especially when he prides himself on his sagacity, and then to be proved wrong by a man who claims he doesn't know anything.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

98. “I'm not saying you're weak, but you brawl like a couple of girls having a pillow fight.” - Andrew Sturm

99. “teenagers are never joking. when seeking to prove a point, principals and teachers should remember that teenagers are never, ever sarcasic or ironic. if they say "I wish someone would drop a bomb on this school right now," that means they have arranged for a nuclear arsenal to be emptied onto the school and should be immediately suspended and ridiculed. if they say they were merely coming up with a joking excuse to postpone a bio test, reply that all jokes are funny, and that since dropping a bomb on a school is not funny, it is therefore not a joke.” - David Levithan

100. “I was just chased through St. Willibald’s, and you know why? Because I was kind to a quig. I scrupulously hide every legitimate reason for people to hate me, and then it turns out they don’t need legitimate reasons. Heaven has fashioned a knife of irony to stab me with.” - Rachel Hartman

101. “I hope I know my own unworthiness, and that I hate and despise myself and all my fellow-creatures as every practicable Christian should.” - Charles Dickens

102. “That was his mother. When she wasn't crying over the breakfast cereal, she was laughing about killing herself.” - Nick Hornby

103. “You might as well laugh at yourself,everyone else is.” - BJ Neblett

104. “Users are a double-edged sword. They can help you improve your language, but they can also deter you from improving. So choose your users carefully, and be slow to grow their number. Having users is like optimization: the wise course is to delay it.” - Paul Graham

105. “Irony is just honesty with the volume cranked up.” - George Saunders

106. “I'm being ironic. Don't interrupt a man in the midst of being ironic, it's not polite. There!” - Ray Bradbury

107. “My momma always said, 'You and Elvis are pretty good, but y'all ain't no Chuck Berry.” - Jerry Lee Lewis

108. “The world had been divided into two parts that sought to annihilate each other because they both desired the same thing, namely the liberation of the oppressed, the elimination of violence, and the establishment of permanent peace.” - Hermann Hesse

109. “I live in my mind, such that whatever destroys me shall be a creature of my own invention.” - Genevieve Ross

110. “I BELIEVE EVERYONE IS SPECIAL . . . BUT SOME PEOPLE THINK . . . . IT'S JUST ANOTHER WAY OF SAYING NO-ONE IS” - ASHISH RANJAN

111. “That Jim Crow there in the window," answered the urchin, holding out a cent, and pointing to the gingerbread figure that had attracted his notice, as he loitered along to school; "the one that has not a broken foot.” - Nathaniel Hawthorne

112. “He led them around the base of a great fallen tree whose exposed roots resembled more than anything else a huge broom - a broom that would have fired the imagination of Rachel the Dragon toward heroic, legendary feats of sweeping.” - Tad Williams

113. “The blessing of the omnivore is that he can eat a great many different things in nature. The curse of the omnivore is that when it comes to figuring out which of those things are safe to eat, he's pretty much on his own.” - Michael Pollan

114. “Most people willingly deceive themselves with a doubly false faith; they believe in eternal memory (of men, things, deeds, peoples) and in rectification (of deeds, errors, sins, injustice). Both are sham. The truth lies at the opposite end of the scale: everything will be forgotten and nothing will be rectified. All rectification (both vengeance and forgiveness) will be taken over by oblivion.” - Milan Kundera

115. “I still couldn't imagine that she was really, truly pregnant; maybe this was an hysterical pregnancy. But Sarah was never hysterical. Enthusiastic, yes, ironic on occasion. I couldn't imagine a doctor saying, "No, it's just an ironic pregnancy.” - James Lileks

116. “I should learn patience, it's a shame there's no time for that.” - Maija Haavisto

117. “In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual «There!» yet at the brink of this story he has as yet gone no further than the conscious stage. As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he is not without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these occasions being varied, of course, with those in which he thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

118. “I never take out clients. It’s bad policy.” He looked me straight in the eyes as he said it. Reaching across for the glove compartment, his arm accidentally brushed my leg.” - Gabrielle Black

119. “You cut life to pieces with your epigrams.” - Oscar Wilde

120. “A gurgling chuckle came from behind him; Jonas had heard it often enough to know that it signified something as close to laughter as the creature ever got. “Yet you believe those things won’t come if you serve your Lord? You know what they say about the road to Hell, Judas.” - Kaine Andrews

121. “It wasn't long after the discovery of modern anesthesia that people began to die of it.” - Wolf Pascoe

122. “You're worse than decent. You're virtuous.” - Eugene O neill