“And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don’t really mean what I’m saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.”

“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.”

“Anyone could say that a miracle is something impossible, but they say it thoughtlessly, mindlessly, because most people have such weak imaginations they couldn’t possibly understand what they’re saying when they say that a miracle is something impossible. Ask anyone what that means, what it means to see a miracle, and they will say that it’s something impossible, but they mean that a miracle is something formerly believed to be impossible that turns out not to be, not to be impossible, in other words, but possible after all. If this were really true, then miracles would be the most ordinary things in the world, the most uninspiring things in the world, and what can one expect from people who have never been anything but ordinary and uninspired.”

“Because there’s nothing wrong with me,” Alec says. “You know what is? Our society is so screwed up from top to bottom, everything about it, that it’s become impossible to fix. It’s easier to change people and make them fit into something that’s broken. Know what I mean?”

“Irony got dangerous when it became a habit. Wallace quoted Lewis Hyde…”Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage.” Then he continued: This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground clearing…. Irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. That was it exactly—Irony was defeatist, timid, the telltale of a generation too afraid to say what it meant, and so in danger of forgetting it had anything to say.”

“It is impossible to say just what I mean!”