irony Quotes

“He is my fate. He’s my soul mate. He pervades my whole existence. So, of course, I often ignore him.”

Beautiful combs, pure tortoise shell, with jewelled rims—just the shade to wear in the beautiful vanished hair.

They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of possession. And now, they were hers, but the tresses that should have adorned the coveted adornments were gone.

“Isn’t it a dandy, Jim? I hunted all over town to find it. You’ll have to look at the time a hundred times a day now. Give me your watch. I want to see how it looks on it.” . . . “Dell,” said he, “let’s put our Christmas presents away and keep ’em a while. They’re too nice to use just at present. I sold the watch to get the money to buy your combs.”

How that stupid, dull Englishman ever came to be admitted within the intellectual circle which revolved round “the cleverest woman in Europe,” as her friends unanimously called her, no one ventured to guess—a golden key is said to open every door, asserted the more malignantly inclined.

“It was none the less a fact, however, that, in the eyes of the very men who spoke thus, the scarlet letter had the effect of the cross on a nun’s bosom.”

“Anointest my head with conductant. Do I get a crown of thorns?”

“Industry, technology, and commerce can thrive only as long as an idealistic national community offers the necessary preconditions. And these do not lie in material egoism, but in a spirit of sacrifice and joyful renunciation.”

“Whom I love? Think a moment. Think of me— Me, whom the plainest woman would despise— Me, with this nose of mine that marches on Before me by a quarter of an hour! Whom should I love? Why—of course—it must be The woman in the world most beautiful.”

″‘To be struck down, Pierced by sword i’ the heart, from a hero’s hand!′ That I had dreamed. O mockery of Fate! —Killed, I! of all men—in an ambuscade! Struck from behind, and by a lackey’s hand! ‘Tis very well. I am foiled, foiled in all, Even in my death.”

″‘Oh,’ sighed the duckling, ‘how thankful I am for being so ugly; even a dog will not bite me.’ And so he lay quite still, while the shot rattled through the rushes, and gun after gun was fired over him.”

“Solitude was a rare commodity on Everest, and I was grateful to be granted a bit of it on this day, in such a remarkable setting.”

“Reaching the top of Everest is supposed to trigger a surge of intense elation; against long odds, after all, I had just attained a goal I’d coveted since childhood.”

“It’s a mean world...there’s nobody to take care of you out there.”

“As I went downstairs I heard Bill singing, ‘Irony and Pity. When you’re feeling . . . Oh, Give them Irony and Give them Pity.‘”

“George: the one thing in this whole sinking world that I am sure of is my … chromosomological partnership in the…creation of our…blond-eyed, blue-haired…son.”

″‘I only wish I had such eyes,’ the King remarked in a fretful tone. ‘To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!‘”

″‘Chinese people do many things,’ she said simply. ‘Chinese people do business, do medicine, do painting. Not lazy like American people. We do torture. Best torture.‘”

″‘Well, in our country,’ said Alice, still panting a little, ‘you’d generally get to somewhere else – if you ran very fast for a long time as we’ve been doing.’ ‘A slow sort of country!’ said the Queen. ‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!‘”

“Expectations were like fine pottery. The harder you held them, the more likely they were to crack.”

“Perhaps that was the beginning of it. Mafatu, the boy who had been christened Stout Heart by his proud father, was afraid of the sea.”

“CAMILLO The heavens continue their loves! ARCHIDAMUS I think there is not in the world either malice or matter to alter it.”

“I do things like get in a taxi and say, ‘The library, and step on it.‘”

“No one plows the field just by thinking about it.”

″‘The thing I like,’ said Hazel, ‘is they all speak English and they’re all Christians. That makes things so much easier.‘”

“Smith had begun that message with what now seemed like an anxious prophecy: ‘assuming we don’t die tonight.‘”

“Your heart’s desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.”

“What I’m doing, what I’ve been doing over the feed for the last two days, is trying to create a customer profile that’s so screwed, no one can market to it. I’m not going to let them catalog me. I’m going to become invisible.”

“One of the great ironies of life is that if you give up your life, you gain it. If you help others, you benefit. If you lose yourself, you find yourself.”

“It’s funny how the darkest moments of your life can bring about the best ones.”

“As the Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Steven Weinberg said, ‘Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.”

“Got room for one more?”

“All my dreams of leaving, but beneath them I was afraid to go. I had clung to them, to Rass, yes, even to my grandmother, afraid that if I loosened my fingers an iota, I would find myself once more cold and clean in a forgotten basket.”

“Yes. Lyra has a part to play in all this, and a major one. The irony is that she must do it all without realizing what she’s doing. She can be helped, though, and if my plan with the Tokay had succeeded, she would have been safe for a little longer.”

“Samson- one of the most powerful and feared figures in the Old Testament. It was rather a grand name for such a scruffy, nondescript dog.”

“The irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.”

“To tell you the truth, Mildred was afraid of the dark, but don’t tell anyone. I mean, whoever heard of a witch who was scared of the dark?”

″‘I forgive you, Sir Knight,’ said Rowena, ‘as a Christian.’ ‘That means,’ said Wamba, ‘that she does not forgive him at all.‘”

″‘That’s Dizzy. A very sad case. He’s scared of heights?’ ‘Scared of heights?’ Pluck asked. ‘A squirrel who’s scared of heights?‘”

“The smoke rose in a lazy spiral, tracing delicate lines of black across the clear air. Jace, alone on the hill overlooking the cemetery, sat with his elbows on his knees and watched the smoke drift heavenward. The irony wasn’t lost on him: These were his father’s remains, after all.”

“And even the children giggled and pushed closer to see this Wolf, who had sailed on every sea man knew, yet hated the very thought of water touching his tender skin.”

“I’d always wanted to see the outside world, I’d always wanted adventure, and now I was going to get it with a vengeance.”

“It’s a funny world! Here I am, a quiet little horse who only wants to serve his master and stay by his side, flung into the forest, tossed into a ditch, hurled over the roof! Who knows what will happen to me next?”

″...when I paid you honor, I reaped no benefits, but now that I ill-treat you I am loaded with an abundance of riches.”

“It was strange that we were called evil when humans were the ones who enjoyed watching us burn.”

“Oh, no, he has plunged a thousand daggers into my heart, tragedy-weapons, I own, which instead of wounding sheathe their points in their own handles, but daggers which he nevertheless believed to be real and deadly.”

“Listen,” said the baroness, smiling; “speaking to you as a friend I can say that the prince does not yet appear all he will be. He has about him a little of that foreign manner by which French persons recognize, at first sight, the Italian or German nobleman. Besides, he gives evidence of great kindness of disposition, much keenness of wit, and as to suitability, M. Danglars assures me that his fortune is majestic—that is his word.”

I drew away from the window, and sat down in my one chair by the bedside, feeling it very sorrowful and strange that this first night of my bright fortunes should be the loneliest I had ever known.

At Startop’s suggestion, we put ourselves down for election into a club called The Finches of the Grove: the object of which institution I have never divined, if it were not that the members should dine expensively once a fortnight, to quarrel among themselves as much as possible after dinner, and to cause six waiters to get drunk on the stairs. I know that these gratifying social ends were so invariably accomplished, that Herbert and I understood nothing else to be referred to in the first standing toast of the society: which ran “Gentlemen, may the present promotion of good feeling ever reign predominant among the Finches of the Grove.”

“You are one of those things that are ever found when least wanted, and when you are wanted, never!”

“How, without wit, he appropriates the wit of others!”

“Keep your hands still, Grisha,” she said, and she took up her work, a coverlet she had long been making. She always set to work on it at depressed moments, and now she knitted at it nervously, twitching her fingers and counting the stitches.

“George stood with clenched hands and glowing eyes, and looking as any other man might look, whose wife was to be sold at auction, and son sent to a trader, all under the shelter of a Christian nation’s laws.”

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.”

“If you are with the quality, or at a funeral, or trying to go to sleep when you ain’t sleepy—if you are anywheres where it won’t do for you to scratch, why you will itch all over in upwards of a thousand places.”