Quotes & Sayings About Ironic

I love Derrick Brown for the surprise of one word waking up next to another. One moment tender, funny or romantic, the next, visceral, ironic and relevatory-here is the full chaos of life. An amazing talent. — Janet Fitch

One of the most difficult and ironic murder weapons is the life jacket. — Demetri Martin

It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours. — Ernest Becker

[The Void Which Binds] actual but unaccessible presence in our universe is one of the prime causes for our species elaborating myth and religion, for our stubborn, blind belief in extrasensory powers, in telepathy and precognition, in demons and demigods and resurrection and reincarnation and ghosts and messiahs and so many other categories of almost-but-not-quite satisfying bullshit. — Dan Simmons

I could spend my whole life photographing circuses. They combine everything I'm interested in - they're ironic, poetic, and corny at the same time. There's also something about a circus that's magical, sentimental, and almost tragic, like a Fellini film. — Mary Ellen Mark

The closest that either Voltaire or the other historical geniuses of the age -- Hume and Gibbon -- came to understanding unreason's creative potentialities was in their Ironic criticism of themselves and in their own efforts to make sense out of history. This, at least, led them to view themselves as being as potentially flawed as the cripples they conceived to be acting out the spectacle of history. — Hayden White

How ironic it is then, to realize how many of we humans are masochists! That even when we are placed in paradise, the majority of us would, by choice, focus on everything outside the present moment and make ourselves suffer by thinking about Dis-Ease! Too many of us would dwell on a past that no longer exists while everything in the present moment is wonderful. What great paradoxes we as humans are capable of! — Alaric Hutchinson

(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

Extremely self-conscious in its craft, in many ways The Hand of Ethelberta is an exploration of fiction as illusion, which involves parody of the conventions it employs; romance, melodrama and farce, and a rejection of realism for absurdist and surrealistic effects. The 'hand' of Ethelberta is an obvious, ironic allusion to courtship, and the sub-title, 'A Comedy in Chapters', suggests the novel's affinity with the conventions of Restoration and eighteenth-century comedy of manners. — Geoffrey Harvey

I didn't see it happening, but the wheels were falling off of me. I didn't care about responsibilities like paying rent, I was just on a runaway train ride. The horribly ironic cosmic trick of drug addiction is that drugs are a lot of fun when you first start using them, but by the time the consequences manifest themselves, you're no longer in a position to say, 'Whoa, gotta stop that.' You've lost that ability, and you've created this pattern of conditioning and reinforcement. It's never something for nothing when drugs are involved. — Anthony Kiedis

Most of all, Violet will know the smile: a slow and confident widening of a too-abundant mouth. This woman is something more than beautiful, something alchemical, an unstable mixture of rare elements bound together by nerve and charm. Am I interrupting something dreadfully important? she asks, with the ironic warmth of a woman who knows in her bones that she is always the most important object in the room. — Beatriz Williams

It's an ironic thing about being an immigrant kid, growing up - 'cause I grew up in the UK and went to a British boarding school and we would go to chapel every Sunday morning. And we'd actually have religious studies and religious studies means Christian studies where you study the Bible. — Aasif Mandvi

It's always struck me as funny that guys with scars get a reputation for being hard. It's the ones that cut them you should be looking out for, right? — Louise Welsh

In my mind, she was Lebkuchen Spice - ironic, Germanic, sexy, and off beat. And, mein Gott, the girl could bake a damn fine cookie ... to the point that I wanted to answer her What do you want for Christmas? with a simple More cookies, please!
But no. She warned me not to be a smart-ass, and while that answer was totally sincere, I was afraid she would think I was joking or,
worse, kissing up.
It was a hard question, especially if I had to batten down the sarcasm. I mean, there was the beauty pageant answer of world peace, although I'd probably have to render it in the beauty pageant spelling of world peas. I could play the boo-hoo orphan card and wish for my whole family to be together, but that was the last thing I wanted, especially at this late date. — David Levithan

It's ironic that I'd use you for my wingman, when I want to fuck you more than any of the women here. — R.K. Lilley

Ironic, isn't it?"
"What?"
"Here I am, trying to survive WITH you, when before my whole plan was just trying to SURVIVE YOU."
"I'm not sure what that means. And I wish you'd stop talking in puzzles and just say normal things, because I've had a big shock. This morning I was looking at a YouTube video of a hamster eating a tiny burrito and now I'm floating on this stupid raft and my friends are dead so just keep that in mind. — Kathy Hepinstall

The ironic thing is that marketers have responded to this problem with the single worst cure possible. To deal with the clutter and the diminished effectiveness of Interruption Marketing, they're interrupting us even more! — Seth Godin

John Baldessari, the 79-year-old conceptualist, has spent more than four decades making laconic, ironic conceptual art-about-art, both good and bad. — Jerry Saltz

Many scientists have interfered with science in precisely the way courts always worried tissue donors might do. "It's ironic," she told me. "The Moore court's concern was, if you give a person property rights in their tissues, it would slow down research because people might withhold access for money. But the Moore decision backfired - it just handed that commercial value to researchers." According to Andrews and a dissenting California Supreme Court judge, the ruling didn't prevent commercialization; it just took patients out of the equation and emboldened scientists to commodify tissues in increasing numbers. Andrews and many others have argued that this makes scientists less likely to share samples and results, which slows research; they also worry that it interferes with health-care delivery. — Rebecca Skloot

(Farm workers) are involved in the planting and the cultivation and the harvesting of the greatest abundance of food known in this society. They bring in so much food to feed you and me and the whole country and enough food to export to other places. The ironic thing and the tragic thing is that after they make this tremendous contribution, they don't have any money or any food left for themselves. — Cesar Chavez

My little girl, oh, the daughter I never had. Now tell me, angel, are you fucking anybody new? — Michael Cunningham

(What I find ironic is that if people would spend more time giving back in a meaningful way and sharing the love they already have with others, they would realize how successful they already are.) — Jairek Robbins

I myself identify as a recovering Blockhead. You'd be surprised how many twenty- and thirty-something hipster chicks have the NKOTB skeleton in their closet, albeit artfully concealed by stacks of Ksubi skinny jeans and ironic Judas Priest T-shirts. — Diablo Cody

It's ironic: In movies, the most successful films of all time have been sci-fi or fantasy. By far. But a lot of people won't even read science fiction books. — David S.Goyer

The more power you have, the less you can truly say. That's the irony. — Michael Soll

The idea that God works in mysterious ways is rubbish. There's nothing mysterious about his ways. They're premeditated and slightly conniving, and they place you in an impossible situation. — Melina Marchetta

If you want everything to be nice and straight all the time, then go live in a world made with a triungular ruler. — Haruki Murakami

Because you have no survival instinct, Grace. You're like a tank, you just chug along< thinking nothing can stop you, until you meet up with a bigger tank. Are you sure you want to go out with someone with that kind of history?" mom seemed to warm her theory. " he couldhave a psychotic break. I read that people get those when they're twenty-eight. he could be almost normal and then suddenly go slasher. I mean, you know I've never told you what to do with your life before now. But what if-I told you not to see him?"
I hadn't been expecting that. My voice was brittle. "I would say that by virtue of your not acting parental up to this point, you've relinquished your abiblity to wield any power now. Sam and I are together. It's not an option."
Mom threw her hands up as if trying to stop the Grace-tank from running over her. "Okay. Fine. Just be careful, okay? Whatever. I'm going to get a drink."
And just like that her parental engergies were expendede. — Maggie Stiefvater

The most ironic outcome of the black Civil Rights movement has been the creation of a new black middle class which is increasingly separate from the black underclass. — Henry Louis Gates

I'm cold in summer. I'm the coldest person ever! It's very ironic I'm never cold in the scripts. Every time I'm shooting, if you don't see a part of me, there are hot water bottles there. — Carice Van Houten

A guy I once knew tried to justify his life choices to me by comparing himself to Genghis Khan." "I take it you didn't find his argument compelling?" Murtry asked with a smirk. "No," Holden said. "And then a friend of mine shot him in the face." "An ironic rebuttal to an argument about necessary violence." "I thought so too, at the time. — James S.A. Corey

I'll tell you one thing," Sorensen said. "If Hillary Clinton should ever become president, God forbid ... " The crowd hissed and booed. Sorensen raised his hands. "If, God forbid, something like that were ever to happen, one of the first things they'd try to do is tax the churches. You can count on that," he said. The crowd gasped at the audacity of the suggestion. I found it ironic that by singling out Hillary specifically, Sorensen had just done the one thing that made the church no longer deserve tax-free status. — Matt Taibbi

Those who condemn the self-righteous for the sake of self-discovery do so with ironic self-righteousness. — Timothy Keller

How ironic! After decades of grub, deluges of wine and alcohol of every sort, after a life spent in butter, cream, rich sauces, and oil in constant, knowingly orchestrated and meticulously cajoled excess, my trustiest right-hand men, Sir Liver and his associate Stomach, are doing marvelously well and it is my heart that is giving out. I am dying of cardiac insufficiency. What a bitter pill to swallow. — Muriel Barbery

He wears his cockiness like an ironic T-shirt, but it fits him better. — Gillian Flynn

Prayer, at its most basic level, was surrender. Like Jesus in the garden, saying, "Not My will, but Yours, be done." The ironic thing was, when a person surrendered their will, they got God's, and then they received what they were really looking for all along. This was what she believed. — Chris Fabry

Despite the earnest belief of most of his fans, Einstein did not win his Nobel Prize for the theory of relativity, special or general. He won for explaining a strange effect in quantum mechanics, the photoelectric effect. His solution provided the first real evidence that quantum mechanics wasn't a crude stopgap for justifying anomalous experiments, but actually corresponds to reality. And the fact that Einstein came up with it is ironic for two reasons. One, as he got older and crustier, Einstein came to distrust quantum mechanics. Its statistical and deeply probabilistic nature sounded too much like gambling to him, and it prompted him to object that "God does not play dice with the universe." He was wrong, and it's too bad that most people have never heard the rejoinder by Niels Bohr: "Einstein! Stop telling God what to do. — Sam Kean

There ain't no devil, only God when he's drunk. — Tom Waits

Even though I dislike being kicked by others, I do enjoy the feeling of kicking others — Yana Toboso

What New England is, is a state of mind, a place where dry humor and perpetual disappointment blend to produce an ironic pessimism that folks from away find most perplexing — Willem Lange

It's so ironic that life is all about love, yet we live most of it either searching, never finding, or messing it up. — Behdad Sami

The ironic, too-cool meta satire, the sneering and mocking? Is actually just a contemporary version of the bourgeois sentimentality it's trying to mock. It is not new. Really it's almost quaint. The backlash has already outlasted it. — Tony Tulathimutte

Al Gore has found a new job. He is going to teach journalism at Columbia University, which is ironic isn't it? The guy who did all the coke winds up going to the White House, the guy who didn't do coke goes to Columbia. — Jay Leno

Many growth-minded people didn't even plan to go to the top. They got there as a result of doing what they love. It's ironic: The top is where the fixed-mindset people hunger to be, but it's where many growth-minded people arrive as a by-product of their enthusiasm for what they do. — Carol S. Dweck

It is ironic that it doesn't matter how successful I am in any other capacity: ultimately, my parents' marker is 'Do you have a wife?' and 'Do you have children?' — Aasif Mandvi

Being a journalist is good if you want to write books: it teaches you to get beyond the blank screen. My books have been described as froth, but there's scope to be witty and ironic about everything in life. — Sophie Kinsella

Unconnected to the life of love, uncolored by love, the world resumes its own, its natural and callous importance. This is first a blow, then an odd consolation. And already I felt my old self - my old, devious, ironic, isolated self - beginning to breathe again and stretch and settle, though all around it my body clung cracked and bewildered, in the stupid pain of loss. — Alice Munro

This was his recognition of the impossibility of changing a man's convictions by words, and his acknowledgment of the possibility of every man thinking, feeling, and seeing things in his own way. This legitimate individuality of every man's views, which formerly troubled or irritated Pierre, now became the basis of the sympathy he felt for other people and the interest that he took in them. The difference, sometimes the complete contradiction, between man's opinions and their lives, and between one man and another, pleased him and drew from him a gentle, ironic smile. — Leo Tolstoy

But flying across the centuries would have been a hefty job even for a very ironic goose. Crossing the Swedish provinces is far easier — Jostein Gaarder

Sigmund Freud often remarked that great revolutions in the history of science have but one common, and ironic, feature: they knock human arrogance off one pedestal after another of our previous conviction about our own self-importance. — Stephen Jay Gould

Thai society rarely attempts to control literature in the same way that it vigilantly polices visual art. It's ironic because people in this society are more aware of literature than they are of art. — Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook

But I was strong enough. I made it through the misery, until misery became normality. I find it ironic that when I finally became okay with the life I created inside 6E - that is when I ended up leaving it. — Alessandra Torre

How ironic, she thought, as she fell to her certain death, that at that moment she would have given anything to be a giant goose again. — Michael Buckley

Most of the time
99 percent of the time
you just don't know how and why the threads are looped together, and that's okay. Do a good thing and something bad happens. Do a bad thing and something good happens. Do nothing and everything explodes. — Lauren Oliver

Doakes had a first name! It was Albert - had anyone ever really called him that? Unthinkable. I had assumed his name was Sergeant. — Jeff Lindsay

I didn't know if his art was helping. But Moses's pictures were like that, glorious and terrible. Glorious because they brought memory to life, terrible for the same reason.
Time softens memories, sanding down the rough edges of death.
But Moses's pictures dripped with life and reminded us of our loss. — Amy Harmon

It seemed ironic to her that women were considered far too meek for the morbidity of war, and yet a child could give their life in a battle they did not even understand. — Katlyn Charlesworth

You know something is wrong when the government declares opening someone else's mail is a felony but your internet activity is fair game for data collecting. — E.A. Bucchianeri

A lot of being a writer doesn't have anything to do with writing. It's ironic - I have to squeeze the books in, even though that's what it's all about. — Augusten Burroughs

I thought that it was more likely the opposite. I must have shut grief out. Found it in books. Cried over fiction instead of the truth. The truth was unconfined, unadorned. There was no poetic language to it, no yellow butterflies, no epic floods. There wasn't a town trapped underwater or generations of men with the same name destined to make the same mistakes. The truth was vast enough to drown in. — Nina LaCour

It's ironic that a hundred people can talk to you, and it really does nothing besides piss you the hell off. But then one person, one person, can fucking make the difference. — Stevie J. Cole

One of the ironic things," Kennedy observed to Norman Cousins in the spring of 1963, " ... is that Mr. Khrushchev and I occupy approximately the same political positions inside our governments. He would like to prevent a nuclear war but is under severe pressure from his hard-line crowd, which interprets every move in that direction as appeasement. I've got similar problems ... . The hard-liners in the Soviet Union and the United States feed on one another."8 — Robert F. Kennedy

Luchesi cannot tell amontillado from a sherry — Edgar Allan Poe

I was actually pretty miserable in high school. I couldn't wait for it to be over. And when it finally was, I remember sitting at graduation with all these classmates getting nostalgic and emotional already and all I could think was, "Get me out of here. I never want to see you people again." So it's ironic that I spend half my day putting myself back there by choice [while writing]. — Sarah Dessen

I didn't recognize it as such then, because I was only thirteen years old, but later I found it a bit ironic that my first time seeing a woman in all her form and glory and saggy drug-tainted tits, arrived at the same exact time as my first introduction to death. — Dave Matthes

Fiction described reality better than non-fiction. — Tommy Wallach

Cats of all kinds weave in and out of the text; Burroughs has clearly taken to them in a big way in his old age and seems torn between a fear they will betray him into sentimentality and a resigned acceptance that a man can't be ironic all the time. — Angela Carter

I like the story about me being pregnant. It was in some Australian magazine, on the front page! I was like, 'Wow, that's just [insane].' And it's not even ironic. I don't even think the article [tried to justify it]; it was just a headline. The article was just like, nothing. — Robert Pattinson

Emily just knew that the grocery store clerk's cousin had slipped on a bath mat and fallen out a second-story open window only to be saved because the woman landed on a discarded mattress.
But what interested Emily most about the incident was how the cousin had subsequently met a man in physical therapy who introduced her to his half brother who she ended up marrying and then running over with her car a year later after a heated argument. And that man, it was discovered, had been the one to dump the mattress in her yard.
He'd saved her so that she could later cripple him.
Emily found that not ironic but intriguing.
Because everything, she believed, was connected. — Holly Goldberg Sloan

We are at a time when postmodernism defies certainty, truth, and meaning; when spiritualism dabbles in quantum theory; and when randomness has become the order of the day. Isn't it ironic that at the same time, the world is on the edge of financial bankruptcy because we have conducted our financial affairs in a random fashion, as if there are no absolutes? — Ravi Zacharias

It is ironic that American women now need to be fortified by the inspiration of the women of the Arab Spring, who risked so much to win basic human rights. — Tina Brown

There are few things more discomfiting than a spontaneous outburst of genuine decency from someone you're determined to dislike for no good reason. — Gregory David Roberts

I find it ironic and unfortunately because people are very vulnerable to populism now these days because they are desperate, we had really difficult times and we had difficult decisions to make. It is natural and it is logical to have people trying to not to vote for Syriza but to vote against the big parties that were in the Government for the last decade. So it is something that you can explain that way. — Eva Kaili

That's right,' said Morin smoothly. 'We had better just let Marfa Timofeyevna finish keeping us on the straight and narrow.' Somehow his tone as he said this managed to suggest both that censorship was silly, and that it was silly to mind it. Galich conceded Morin a small internal round of (Applause), his headache whispering in his temples. He was highly accomplished himself at finding pleasure-giving, urbane descriptions of what couldn't be helped, but Morin, moreover, had hit the precise note of the moment, liberally-minded yet unchallenging, ironic yet inoffensive. The — Francis Spufford

It is a little ironic that one thing a babysitter should not do is sit on a baby. — Demetri Martin

Two people, two hands, and two songs, in this case "Big Shot" and "Bette Davis Eyes." The lyrics of the two songs provided no commentary, honest or ironic, on the proceedings. They were merely there and always underfoot, the insistent gray muck that was pop culture. It stuck to our shoes and we tracked it through our lives. — Colson Whitehead

You know? Ain't it ironic how we live our entire lives without the luxury of time, only to spend an eternity in death. — Jason Medina

Nothing in the church makes people in the church more angry than grace. It's ironic: we stumble into a party we weren't invited to and find the uninvited standing at the door making sure no other uninviteds get in. Then a strange phenomenon occurs: as soon as we are included in the party because of Jesus' irresponsible love, we decide to make grace "more responsible" by becoming self-appointed Kingdom Monitors, guarding the kingdom of God, keeping the riffraff out (which, as I understand it, are who the kingdom of God is supposed to include). — Mike Yaconelli

It was ironic how love could awaken them to the wonders of the universe, while at the same time confine their attention to one another. — Alexandra Adornetto

I'm not some character from a boys' manga." ~Yukio — Kazue Kato

It was the essence of life to disbelieve in death for one's self, to act as if life would continue forever. And life had to act also as if little issues were big ones. To take a realistic attitude toward life and death meant that one lapsed into unreality. Into insanity. It was ironic that the only way to keep one's sanity was to ignore that one was in an insane world or to act as if the world were sane. — Philip Jose Farmer

They would sweep their poverty under the carpet if only they had one. — Ljupka Cvetanova

You know what's kind of funny? Well, not funny, but ironic, maybe? She's been here nine months now, and it takes nine months to create life. It's like she's been reborn. And the fact that tomorrow you turn eighteen is just another piece of it. It feels like right now is the start of something, like we're at the beginning and not the finish line."
Dominic started to walk away but paused after a few steps, his brow furrowed. "Actually, I don't think that's what irony is. Haven would probably correct me again and say I was being symbolic. — J.M. Darhower

Scotsmen are metaphisical and emotional, they are sceptical and mystical, they are romantic and ironic, they are cruel and tender, and full of mirth and despair. — William Dunbar

Really?"
"No. I'm being ironic. Or is it sarcastic? I can never remember."
"Irony's cleverer, so you're probably being sarcastic. — Jonathan Stroud

It strikes me as horribly ironic that you apparently need a Fairy Godmother to properly manage your courtship of a Fairy Godmother. — Jenniffer Wardell

It would have been so perfectly ironic if I had been killed by the dog, because I was petting a dog who was not used to being pet, because I think I'm some kind of dog whisperer, and I think I can make any dog love me. — Pam Houston

Either way, Grayson found it ironic how such dissimilar circumstances, colleges, and mental hospitals, had led to the same awful apartment. — Dorothy McFalls

leaving Will to stand by and watch, wearing that stupid grin he never seemed to shake anymore. I missed his ironic scowl. I missed his insistence that we were a bunch of pussies. God, he was the biggest fucking pussy now. — Christina Lauren

It may seem somewhat ironic that the Catholic Church finds itself advocating the same position against abortion as its severest Christian critics, the Protestant fundamentalists. In fact, it is no more surprising than finding the so-called pro-life movement keeping company with Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao, all of whom at one time or another banned abortions. What they have in common is their belief, rooted in misogyny, that the woman's right to choose - a fundamental aspect of her autonomy - must be crushed in order to achieve what they have deemed a 'higher' religious, moral or social goal. — Jack Holland

here's probably something ironic about werewolves gathering in the back of a Piggly Wiggly, but — Elliott James

Amusement, even ironic amusement, is the beginning of sincere appreciation, as any lapsed hipster knows. — Last Man Standing

Is that supposed to be ironic or predictive or something? — Penelope Fletcher

It is quite ironic that those calling the loudest for 'morality' are typically the most immoral of all. — Christina Engela

How ironic is it to see a bumper sticker that says 'Jesus is the answer' next to a bumper sticker supporting the war in Iraq, as if to says 'Jesus is the answer - but not in the real world. — Shane Claiborne

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility. — Errol Morris

The literal mind can never understand the ironic mind. — Christopher Hitchens

It's kind of ironic that the two sports with the greatest characters, boxing and horse racing, have both been on the decline. In both cases it's for the lack of a suitable hero. — Dick Schaap

It is ironic that constructive thinkers are often misunderstood as negative, as they differ from those longing for positivity: constructive thinkers have been conditioned to find positive in negative rather than suffering from the negative in negative. Or as Paul the Apostle wrote, 'I have learned the secret to contentment in any and every circumstance.' He was right. Indeed the Lord is our strength, especially under the commandment to love one another. Otherwise we are nothing and easily thrown about by both our own and other people's mind control in a painful, mental, physical desperation to run from every thought, every thing, and every one not seeming so positive or immediately beneficial to us. — Criss Jami

A machine! I have become a machine! It has taken over my life. How ironic! In a world of freedom and independence, my entire life now depends on a machine! — Leigh Hershkovich