Mordant Quotes & Sayings

The Sarajevans have a very particular world view - a mordant wit coupled with this unbearable sadness and ... truckloads of guts, you know. — Geraldine Brooks

Practical application is the only mordant which will set things in the memory. Study without it is gymnastics, and not work, which alone will get intellectual bread. — James Russell Lowell

If the literary category of 'mordant fable' exists at all, it may be because Brock Clarke invented it. The Happiest People in the World is everything we fans have come to love from a Clarke novel: playful and deliriously skewed, and somehow balancing between genuinely great-hearted and gloriously weird. — Lauren Groff

Men grow cold as girls grow old
And we all lose our charms in the end.
How prettily Lorelei Lee sang these mordant lyrics! — Joyce Carol Oates

Rob Chilson's mordant wit will keep you turning the pages until the wee hours! — Algis Budrys

I have never injured anybody with a mordant poem; my
verse contains charges against nobody. Ingenuous, I have
shunned wit steeped in venom
not a letter of mine is dipped
in poisonous jest. — Ovid

A hilarious academic novel that'll send you laughing (albeit ruefully) back into the trenches of the classroom ... [A] mordant minor masterpiece ... Like the best works of farce, academic or otherwise, Dear Committee Members deftly mixes comedy with social criticism and righteous outrage. By the end, you may well find yourself laughing so hard it hurts. — Maureen Corrigan

-the wind called a mordant note through the sickly trees while other less explicable sounds scraped up the beach-head toward him-waiting for the unknown wickedness to arrive. — Nick Cutter

The only faith that wears well and holds its color in all weathers is that which is woven of conviction and set with the sharp mordant of experience. — James Russell Lowell

Satan is too hard a master. He would never command as did the Other with divine simplicity: 'Do likewise.' The devil will have no victims resemble him. He permits only a rough caricature, impotent, abject, which has to serve as food for eternal irony, the mordant irony of the depths.
Diary of a Country Priest — Georges Bernanos

We've seen firsthand the footprints of the Mordant's treachery. — Karen Azinger

The reductio ad absurdum of M.D.'s view, I argued, was that science devises ever bloodier means of war until humanity's powers of destruction overcome our powers of creation and our civilization drives itself to extinction. M.D. embraced my objection with mordant glee. 'Precisely. Our will to power, our science, and those v. faculties that elevated us from apes, to saves, to modern man, are the same faculties that'll snuff out Homo Sapiens before this century is out! You'll probably live to see it happen, you fortunate son. What a symphonic crescendo that'll be, eh? — David Mitchell

Gonzo ... acidic hilarity ... 'The Fun Parts' has fine moments, but it's not the whole Lipsyte story. Read it with 'The Ask' if you really want to know how a mordant jokester with a madman's imagination became a literary rock star. — Janet Maslin

The text moves like a small crustacean with compound eye and complex nervous system; throbbing, involuted, it becomes a parasite on a different body, animal, using 'filiform protrusions through which it sucks the vital juices of its host.' Parasite or creature in mutation on the shore, torrid / delirium: mordant mortality, systematic competition the narrator against the I, leaking gas, a lapse of memory against a promise, an inset in a book. A muscular, involuntary bulging in the breast, circling all its inner surface: mesoblast: visceral. — Nicole Brossard