“sometimes there is too much irony all piled up in the barn, and you have to / pitchfork another steaming pile of irony on top of it all, and you have to / pitchfork another, and another, and another / when the world is shit-streaked with irony that is when beauty will emerge / love is irony / purists sure hate farce / but pushing against things is the only possible way to live”

“Every man is a prisoner, and the greatest irony of all is to be the prisoner of another man.”

“The irony of life is that the child begins to become an adult when he starts to live alone and he loses the security provided by those who love him and are always close to him.”

“So I told her that I loved her, not for telling me the thing she had told me, but for the courage involved in telling something like it, something that sad.”

“Writing is beautiful, like putting on a gold suit and going to sleep in it.”

“Even the things that showed him his path seemed to point at what a fool he was. Another of life's ironies? Or just fate's way of mocking him?”

“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.”