Irony has a unique way of revealing truths through unexpected twists and contrasts, often adding humor, depth, or a touch of sarcasm to everyday situations. Whether you're looking for a clever observation or a witty remark, this carefully curated collection of the top 148 irony quotes offers a fascinating glimpse into the art of saying one thing while meaning another. Dive in and enjoy the clever insights that irony brings to life.
1. “O, wonder!How many goodly creatures are there here!How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,That has such people in't!” - William Shakespeare
2. “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
3. “Thank you for sending me a copy of your book. I'll waste no time reading it.” - Moses Hadas
4. “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
5. “Would you like me to [kill you] now?" asked Snape, his voice heavy with irony. "Or would you like a few moments to compose an epitaph?” - J. K. Rowling
6. “It is sometimes easier to be happy if you don't know everything.” - Alexander McCall Smith
7. “I'm not scared of death, I just don't want to seek it out.” - Tommy Higgins
8. “Common sense is the most widely shared commodity in the world, for every man is convinced that he is well supplied with it.” - René Descartes
9. “It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” - Voltaire
10. “Nobody can tell what I suffer! But it is always so. Those who do not complain are never pitied.” - Jane Austen
11. “I'd kill for a Nobel Peace Prize.” - Steven Wright
12. “Food is an important part of a balanced diet.” - Fran Lebowitz
13. “I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky
14. “The prince of darkness is a gentleman!” - William Shakespeare
15. “If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you.” - Harlan Ellison
16. “Human nature is pretty shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.” - Peter Devries
17. “I will never lie again.” - William Faulkner
18. “That's the difference between irony and sarcasm. Irony can be spontaneous, while sarcasm requires volition. You have to create sarcasm.” - Christopher Moore
19. “Perhaps we can conceive of the ironist as the fetishist's apprentice, reaching out for all readers, ensnaring them in a tangle of ambiguity, uncertainty and indecision from which there is no escape. Irony, quite possibly, makes fetishists of us all.” - Janet Beizer
20. “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
21. “It’s sarcasm, Josh.”“Sarcasm?”“It’s from the Greek, sarkasmos. To bite the lips. It means that you aren’t really saying what you mean, but people will get your point. I invented it, Bartholomew named it.”“Well, if the village idiot named it, I’m sure it’s a good thing.”“There you go, you got it.”“Got what?”“Sarcasm.”“No, I meant it.”“Sure you did.”“Is that sarcasm?”“Irony, I think.”“What’s the difference?”“I haven’t the slightest idea.”“So you’re being ironic now, right?”“No, I really don’t know.”“Maybe you should ask the idiot.”“Now you’ve got it.”“What?”“Sarcasm.” - Christopher Moore
22. “Those darling byegone times, Mr Carker,' said Cleopatra, 'with their delicious fortresses, and their dear old dungeons, and their delightful places of torture, and their romantic vengeances, and their picturesque assaults and sieges, and everything that makes life truly charming! How dreadfully we have degenerated!” - Charles Dickens
23. “But though it had prevailed against such fierce adversaries as fire and flood, it had fallen victim softly and swiftly to television in the 1960's.” - Kate Morton
24. “I'd rather be partly great than entirely useless.” - Neal Shusterman
25. “Irony cleans away all those secret stains. Irony is the path that leads safely back to official realities.” - Geoffrey Wall
26. “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
27. “Irony - The modern mode: either the devil’s mark or the snorkel of sanity.” - Julian Barnes
28. “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
29. “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
30. “The things I do for love.” - George R.R. Martin
31. “Even things that are true can be proved.” - Oscar Wilde
32. “Captain Smek himself appeared on television for an official speech to humankind. [...] 'Noble Savages of Earth,' he said. 'Long time we have tried to live together in peace.' (It had been five months.) 'Long time have the Boov suffered under the hostileness and intolerableness of you people. With sad hearts I now concede that Boov and humans will never to exist as one.' I remember being really excited at this point. Could I possibly be hearing right? Were the Boov about to leave? I was so stupid.'And so now I generously grant you Human Preserves - gifts of land that will be for humans forever, never to be taken away again, now.' [...] So that's when we Americans were given Florida. One state for three hundred million people. There were going to be some serious lines for the bathrooms.” - Adam Rex
33. “I'm sick of the ignorance that lack of funding has generated, of the fathers who apporach me at dinner parties with their four-year-old girls clasped to their pant legs and say, "Yeah, but studies say kids can buy drugs more easily than they can buy alcohol." To which I always respond, "I guess that means you keep heroin in your liquor cabinet?” - Koren Zailckas
34. “Die? I should say not, dear fellow. No Barrymore would allow such a conventional thing to happen to him.” - John Barrymore
35. “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, by Mr. Punch, a great deal of this sad misunderstanding might have been prevented.” - Edmund Gosse
36. “Irony takes nothing away from pathos.” - Gustave Flaubert
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. “In the State of Denmark there was the odor of decay...” - Roger Zelazny
39. “I'd rather be dead than singing 'Satisfaction' when I'm 45.” - Mick Jagger
40. “The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis.” - Umberto Eco
41. “When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine's Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship—though I like to think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn't known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offense of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment to the Constitution, could be imagined. President George H.W. Bush, when asked to comment, could only say grudgingly that, as far as he could see, no American interests were involved…” - Christopher Hitchens
42. “Your favorite virtue? An appreciation for irony.” - Christopher Hitchens
43. “They had supported him ... for freedom's sake, they would have said; meaning as do all men who mouth that catchword, freedom for themselves and their own class.” - Margaret Butler
44. “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 curses—'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
45. “I don’t know why you’re enjoying this so much.”“Because I am a connoisseur of fine irony. ’Tis a bit like fine wine, but has a better bite.” - Lynn Kurland
46. “I took my .38 out and looked to see that there were bullets in all the proper places. I knew there would be, but it did no harm to be careful. And I'd seen Clint Eastwood do it once in the movies.” - Robert B. Parker
47. “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 his broad chest. "And if they doona believe we're peaceful, then we'll have to kill the bastards." Roman frowned, somehow their Highlander logic escaped him.” - Kerrelyn Sparks
48. “Simply put, dramatic irony is when a person makes a harmless remark, and someone else who hears it knows something that makes the remark have a different, and usually unpleasant, meaning. For instance, if you were in a restaurant and said out loud, "I can't wait to eat the veal marsala I ordered," and there were people around who knew that the veal marsala was poisoned and that you would die as soon as you took a bite, your situation would be one of dramatic irony.” - Lemony Snicket
49. “Can't you see that I'm only advising you to beg yourself not to be so dumb?” - Petronius
50. “If one cannot learn from the mistakes of others, one might as well become a Democrat.” - Esther M. Friesner
51. “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
52. “Jesus Christ was innocent too,' said Svejk, 'and all the same they crucified him. No one anywhere has ever worried about a man being innocent. Maul halten und weiter dienen ['Grin and bear it and get on with the job'] - as they used to tell us in the army. That's the best and finest thing of all.” - Jaroslav Hasek
53. “Don't you know that I passionately dote on every chin on his face?” - Dorothy L. Sayers
54. “I cannot say much for this Monarch's Sense--Nor would I if I could, for he was a Lancastrian. I suppose you know all about the Wars between him and the Duke of York who was on the right side; if you do not, you had better read some other History, for I shall not be very difuse in this, meaning by it only to vent my spleen against, and show my Hatred to all those people whose parties or principles do not suit with mine, and not to give information.” - Jane Austen
55. “Faith is a luxury for those who are able to ignore what the rest of us must see every day. Pessimism, distrust, and irony are the holy trinity of my religion, irony in particular.” - Brando Skyhorse
56. “But that's men all over ... Poor dears, they can't help it. They haven't got logical minds.” - Dorothy L. Sayers
57. “There's a large strain of irony in our human affairs... Interwoven with our affairs is this wonderful spirit of irony which prevents us from ever being utterly and irretrievably serious, from being unaware of the mysterious nature of our existence.” - Malcolm Muggeridge
58. “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
59. “The cinema is an invention without any future.” - Louis Lumière
60. “And, conversely, she went on to herself, sneering at the Grand Duke's palace, poverty is wasted on the poor, who never know how to make the best of things, are only the rich without money, are just as useless at looking after themselves, can't handle their cash just like the rich can't, always squandering it on bright, pretty, useless things in just the same way.” - Angela Carter
61. “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” - Samuel Johnson
62. “What are all these?" Clary asked."Vials of holy water, blessed knives, steel and silver blades," Jace said, piling the weapons on the floor beside him, "electrum wire - not much use at the moment but it's always good to have spares - silver bullets, charms of protetion, crucifixes, stars of David-""Jesus," said Clary"I doubt he'd fit.""Jace." Clary was appalled.” - Cassandra Clare
63. “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
64. “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” - Laura Fitzgerald
65. “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
66. “God hides the fires of hell within paradise.” - Paulo Coelho
67. “So such is life that it writes itself, trying to right itself, but there's nothing wrong with it.” - Robert Pollard
68. “Imagine the wizened quality of a life blanched of contradiction and double standard.p 44” - Michael Perry
69. “I'm a survivor, " I said. But I didn't think that claim would carry much weight in an obituary.” - Tobias Wolff
70. “As learnèd commentators viewIn Homer more than Homer knew.” - Jonathan Swift
71. “These were always the weirdest trips for me, when it was midnight or even later, and we pulled up to a dark house, trying to be quiet. Like a robbery in reverse, creeping around to leave something rather than take it.” - Sarah Dessen
72. “And it's really very difficult to kill someone when all your inner instincts would oblige you to take off your hat first!” - Susan Kay
73. “People who didn't need people needed people around to know that they were the kind of people who didn't need people.” - Terry Pratchett
74. “(About sweeping)....What he was in FACT doing was moving the dirt around with a broom, to give it a change of scenery and a chance to make new friends.” - Terry Pratchett
75. “You know, you're rather amusingly wrong.” - Terry Pratchett
76. “Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
77. “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
78. “The beauty and mystery of this world only emerges through affection, attention, interest and compassion . . . open your eyes wide and actually see this world by attending to its colors, details and irony.” - Orhan Pamuk
79. “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
80. “I always think it's funny when Indians celebrate Thanksgiving. I mean, sure, the Indians and Pilgrims were best friends during the first Thanksgiving, but a few years later, the Pilgrims were shooting Indians.So I'm never quite sure why we eat turkey like everybody else.” - Sherman Alexie
81. “[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
82. “When it comes to judging individuals, I do not like remarks such as 'too good to be true.' They speak as though one is rewarding the nature of evil. Yet, ironically, we still wonder where all the good people have gone.” - Criss Jami
83. “Irony is the word I forget the meaning of immediately after I look it up, but I kind of feel like I live in a constant state of it.” - Maureen Johnson
84. “Maybe illusion and artifice—lies, even—are a necessary part of romance.” - Jody Gehrman
85. “Inexplicably, I felt drops of icy sweat dripping up my back. I am aware that icy and sweat are contradictory by their very nature and should not be able to coexist in the same freakish bead of ICK WHAT IS THAT falling up my back. I am also aware things are not supposed to fall up. For that matter, criminals aren’t supposed to get it on with crimefighters. Yet here we were: Catwoman, Batman, icy, sweat, dripping, up. Sometimes life is like that.” - Chris Dee
86. “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
87. “The over-weight and out of shape guy who owned the house had apparently decided that having a half-million dollar house meant that he couldn’t afford to hire someone to clean out his gutters. Now he was dead with what looked to me like a broken neck after the ladder had slipped. He’d taken the plunge into his fancy landscaping—complete with rock garden. But hey, his fucking gutters were clean.” - Diana Rowland
88. “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
89. “But you see, a rich country like America can perhaps afford to be stupid.” - Barack Obama
90. “Even if that were true, it wouldn't be irony," Lucas pointed out. "Irony is the contrast between what's said and what happens.” - Claudia Gray
91. “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
92. “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
93. “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
94. “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
95. “The worst mistake a writer can make is to assume everyone has an imagination.” - Andrew McEwan
96. “And yet Praecursoris is not punished the same way, only because it is not practical, and he is needed for breeding?” - Naomi Novik
97. “Gods can screw anything and anybody. For reference, see history.Atticus O'Sullivan” - Kevin Hearne
98. “Two whores who finally found something to mother. A guy could write a book about it, he thought bitterly, call it From Hair To Maternity. It would probly be a very long book. Whores did not produce as fast as rabbits.” - James Jones
99. “Scary discovery of the day: Most people who RT @yokoono's tweets do so without irony.” - James Taranto
100. “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
101. “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
102. “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
103. “It would be the last thing he did if he beat my dog.” - Holly Hood
104. “Poets speak of hope in ladies smiles, but give me a smirk any day, I say.” - Lois McMaster Bujold
105. “The thing about changing the world... Once you do it, the world's all different.” - Joss Whedon
106. “Tremendous beauty and tremendous ugliness puts you on the outside of things.” - Peter Bogdonavich
107. “The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
108. “He sure put things into words good.” - S.E. Hinton
109. “I think sometimes people think cheerful is a synonym for dumb, so no one is ever cheerful.” - Mindy Kaling
110. “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
111. “I often wonder why the whole world is so prone to generalise. Generalisations are seldom if ever true and are usually utterly inaccurate.” - Agatha Christie
112. “The other shoppers were too well behaved to stare at the green-headed stoner and the tear-streaked lady zigzagging up the aisles with a chubby bearded guy scurrying behind them picking up the things they dropped.” - Amy Goldman Koss
113. “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
114. “Seven pillars of wisdom propping the roof of the temple. Always remember what there's beyond the pillars.” - Lara Biyuts
115. “Then you do not belong here. Death holds no sweetness in this house. We are not warriors, nor soldiers, nor swaggering bravos puffed up with pride. We do not kill to serve some lord, to fatten our purses, to stroke our vanity. We never give the gift to please ourselves. Nor do we choose the ones we kill. We are but servants of the God of Many Faces.""Valar dohaeris." All men must serve."You know the words, but you are too proud to serve. A servant must be humble and obedient.""I obey. I can be humbler than anyone."That made him chuckle. "You will be the very goddess of humility, I am sure. But can you pay the price?""What price?""The price is you. The price is all you have and all you ever hope to have. We took your eyes and gave them back. Next we will take your ears, and you will walk in silence. You will give us your legs and crawl. You will be no one's daughter, no one's wife, no one's mother. Your name will be a lie, and the very face you wear will not be your own.” - George R.R. Martin
116. “Who else but me is ever going to read these letters?” - Anne Frank
117. “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?” - Michael Moorcock
118. “Yup, believe it: I was born on March 28, yet my name is April.” - Sarah Mlynowski
119. “Where did you find construction guys swapping dirty jokes in proto-Númenorean?” Aura asked.“On construction sites. Is that coffee ready?” - john barnes
120. “The only ironic thing about that song is that it's called 'Ironic' and it is written by a woman who doesn't know what irony is. That's quite ironic when you think about it. (on Alanis Morissette's 'Ironic')” - Ed Byrne
121. “War is always an adventure to those who've never seen it.” - Anthony Ryan
122. “So the reason I was struck again and again was because of my overwhelmingly positive energy. Funny, I'd always thought of myself as a pessimist.” - Jennifer Bosworth
123. “Anyway, if the Cetagandans really wanted to assassinate you, they'd hardly do it here. They'd slip something subtle under your skin that wouldn't go off for six months, and then would drop you mysteriously and untraceably in your tracks” - Lois McMaster Bujold
124. “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
125. “If I had a reader and he had read all I have written so far of my adventures, there would be certainly no need to inform him that I am not created for any sort of society. The trouble is I don't know how to behave in company. If I go anywhere among a great many people I always have a feeling as though I were being electrified by so many eyes looking at me. It positively makes me shrivel up, physically shrivel up, even in such places as the theatre, to say nothing of private houses. I did not know how to behave with dignity in these gambling saloons and assemblies; I either was still, inwardly upbraiding myself for my excessive mildness and politeness, or I suddenly got up and did something rude. And meanwhile all sorts of worthless fellows far inferior to me knew how to behave with wonderful aplomb-- and that's what really exasperated me above everything, so that I lost my self-possession more and more. I may say frankly, even at that time, if the truth is to be told, the society there, and even winning money at cards, had become revolting and a torture to me. Positively a torture. I did, of course, derive acute enjoyment from it, but this enjoyment was at the cost of torture.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky
126. “What a refreshing mind you have, young man. There really is nothing quite like total ignorance, is there?” - Neil Gaiman
127. “That was his mother. When she wasn't crying over the breakfast cereal, she was laughing about killing herself.” - Nick Hornby
128. “Once you hold the hand of Death, the only thing in life that can scare you is a sense of humor.” - Lionel Suggs
129. “So through a world of piety I made my way to Sebastian.” - Evelyn Waugh
130. “The Cinderella story in reverse. I only wish there were ashes in the fireplace so I could order you to sweep them out.” - Susan Elizabeth Phillips
131. “How strange it was to think that he, who such a short time ago dared not believe in the happiness of her loving him, now felt unhappy because she loved him too much!” - Leo Tolstoy
132. “Laughter and irony are at heart reminders that we are not prisoners in this world, but voyagers through it.” - Eben Alexander
133. “Irony is just honesty with the volume cranked up.” - George Saunders
134. “I'm starting to feel like a character from one of these books” - Christina Tetreault
135. “Regret and pangs of conscience are feelings we assign to others to make the world seem a little more fair, to even things out a little and provide consolation. In reality, those who do wrong to us never think about us as much as we think about them, and that is the ultimate irony: their deeds live inside us, festering, while they live out in the world, plucking peaches off trees, biting juicily into them, their minds on things lovely and sweet.” - Samuel Park
136. “My momma always said, 'You and Elvis are pretty good, but y'all ain't no Chuck Berry.” - Jerry Lee Lewis
137. “It’s awful, telling it like this, isn’t it? As though we didn’t know the ending. As though it could have another ending. It’s like watching Romeo drink poison. Every time you see it you get fooled into thinking his girlfriend might wake up and stop him. Every single time you see it you want to shout, 'You stupid ass, just wait a minute,' and she’ll open her eyes! 'Oi, you, you twat, open your eyes, wake up! Don’t die this time!' But they always do.” - Elizabeth Wein
138. “I BELIEVE EVERYONE IS SPECIAL . . . BUT SOME PEOPLE THINK . . . . IT'S JUST ANOTHER WAY OF SAYING NO-ONE IS” - ASHISH RANJAN
139. “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
140. “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
141. “I should learn patience, it's a shame there's no time for that.” - Maija Haavisto
142. “How much truth is contained in something can be best determined by making it thoroughly laughable and then watching to see how much joking around it can take. For truth is a matter that can withstand mockery, that is freshened by any ironic gesture directed at it. Whatever cannot withstand satire is false.” - Peter Sloterdijk
143. “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
144. “Acceptable hypocrisy is often called politeness.” - Shannon L. Alder
145. “We give up our power to the very people who took it away from us in the first place.” - Patti Digh
146. “It wasn't long after the discovery of modern anesthesia that people began to die of it.” - Wolf Pascoe
147. “Mundane, boring stories--not interesting ones--are the ideal in an operating room.” - Wolf Pascoe
148. “Good judgment comes by way of experience, which comes of bad judgment.” - Wolf Pascoe
