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Exlpore more Irony quotes

"The funny part of being funny is when you start seeing your fans writing funny words and attributing them to you."

"A tree fears an axe even though its handle is made from it."

"As the ironist does not have the new within his power, it might be asked how he destroys the old, and to this it must be answered: he destroys the given actuality by the given actuality itself."

"Often it does seem such a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat."

"A drunken but exceedingly depressed German clown from Munich entertained the public."

"Starving whilst schooled is like a man's finding out that his wife is on her periods - a few seconds after he took Viagra."
Explore more quotes by David Foster Wallace

"It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art."

"The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish."

"It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed ... If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell."

"Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly."

"Bliss-a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious-lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you've never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it's like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom."

"The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, "then" what do we do?"

"He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. And the projected future fear. ... It's too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it's as of now real. ... He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What's unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. ... But he could choose not to listen."

"Why do prostitutes when they get straight always try and get so prim? It's like long-repressed librarian-ambitions come flooding out."
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