"Witch king: Fool. No man may can kill me!
Eowyn: (pulls off helmet) I am no man! (kills him)"
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings - Return of the King)

"Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony."
— Douglas Coupland (Shampoo Planet)

"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."
— Voltaire

"It is sometimes easier to be happy if you don't know everything."
— Alexander McCall Smith (Morality for Beautiful Girls)

"I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground)

"Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song;
a medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
and I am Marie of Romania."
— Dorothy Parker

"Nay, but prithee, with sprinkles 'pon it instead," I said solemnly, "and frosting of white."
— Jim Butcher (Small Favor)

"The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues.
...
[But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"I quote others only to better express myself."
— Michel de Montaigne

"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you."
— Harlan Ellison

"Maugham then offers the greatest advice anyone could give to a young author: "At the end of an interrogation sentence, place a question mark. You'd be surprised how effective it can be.""
— Woody Allen

"That's the nature of being a parent, Sabine has discovered. You'll love your children far more than you ever loved your parents, and -- in the recognition that your own children cannot fathom the depth of your love -- you come to understand the tragic, unrequited love of your own parents."
— Ursula Hegi

""So, like I said, these are a bunch of really sweet guys, but you wouldn't want to share a Galaxy with them, not if they're just gonna keep at it, not if they're not gonna learn to relax a little. I mean it's just gonna be continual nervous time, isn't it, right? Pow, pow, pow, when are they next coming at us? Peaceful coexistence is just right out, right? Get me some water somebody, thank you."

He sat back and sipped reflectively.

"OK," he said, "hear me, hear me. It's, like, these guys, you know, are entitled to their own view of the Universe. And according to their view, which the Universe forced on them, right, they did right. Sounds crazy, but I think you'll agree. They believe in ..."

He consulted a piece of paper which he found in the back pocket of his Judicial jeans.

"They believe in `peace, justice, morality, culture, sport, family life, and the obliteration of all other life forms'.""
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Tertiary Phase)

""We're not obsessed by anything, you see," insisted Ford.

"..."

"And that's the deciding factor. We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win."

"I care about lots of things," said Slartibartfast, his voice trembling partly with annoyance, but partly also with uncertainty.

"Such as?"

"Well," said the old man, "life, the Universe. Everything, really. Fjords."

"Would you die for them?"

"Fjords?" blinked Slartibartfast in surprise. "No."

"Well then."

"Wouldn't see the point, to be honest.""
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Tertiary Phase)

"Common sense is the most widely shared commodity in the world, for every man is convinced that he is well supplied with it."
— René Descartes

"Christ has no body now on earth but yours,
no hands but yours,
no feet but yours,
Yours are the eyes through which to look out
Christ's compassion to the world
Yours are the feet with which he is to go about
doing good;
Yours are the hands with which he is to bless men now."
— Teresa of Ávila

"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you."
— Don Marquis

"People often say that the English are very cold fish, very reserved, that they have a way of looking at things – even tragedy – with a sense of irony. There’s some truth in it; it’s pretty stupid of them, though. Humor won’t save you; it doesn’t really do anything at all. You can look at life ironically for years, maybe decades; there are people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end, life always breaks your heart. Doesn’t matter how brave you are, how reserved, or how much you’ve developed a sense of humor, you still end up with your heart broken. That’s when you stop laughing. In the end there’s just the cold, the silence and the loneliness. In the end, there’s only death."
— Michel Houellebecq (The Elementary Particles)

"To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself."
— Albert Einstein

"She was heartily ashamed of her ignorance - a misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well−informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the
vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the
misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

"Some motherfuckers are always trying to ice skate up hill"
— Blade

"Food is an important part of a balanced diet."
— Fran Lebowitz

"Don’t underestimate the value of irony—it is extremely valuable."
— Henry James (Washington Square)

"Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blasé ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosphere of great days … the region of pure poetry."
— Charles Baudelaire (Intimate Journals)

"During the first day, curious at having outsiders among them, a long stream of inmates came over and talked with me. Remarkably, according to what they told me, nearly every inmate in the prison didn't do it. Several thousand people had been locked up unjustly and, by an incredible coincidence, all in the same prison.

On the other hand, they knew an awful lot about how to knife somebody."
— Alan Alda (Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I've Learned)

"Dream Song of Thunders:

Sometimes
I go about pitying
Myself,
While I am carried by the wind
Across the sky. "
— Frances Densmore (American Indians and Their Music)

"With every mistake, we must surely be learning."
— Harrison

"on the other hand, who would be a more dedicated gay-basher than a gay school board member? look at congress."
— John L'Heureux (An Honorable Profession)

"Human nature is pretty shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection."
— Peter Devries

"Irony cleans away all those secret stains. Irony is the path that leads safely back to official realities."
— Geoffrey Wall (Madame Bovary)

"Corporate irony not only ridicules the thing it is selling but the very act of selling it. In the process it disarms critics by making anyone who goes against the flow of commerce seem clueless."
— David Denby

"I'm not scared of death, I just don't want to seek it out."
— Thomas James Higgins

"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."
— Herbert Alexander Simon

"Irony - The modern mode: either the devil’s mark or the snorkel of sanity."
— Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)

"Now it turns out that a few broadsheet film critics in Britain do indeed belong to a category of people who would have resisted Hitler when he came to power. So the great shame is, clearly film critics should have been running Austria at the time, because Hitler would have represented no problem to them at all. [The Guardian's] Peter Bradshaw would have known exactly what to do, and he would not have been remotely fallible to any Nazi who threatened his life. No, he would have died in heroic acts of individual resistance. So it's a privilege to live among people who enjoy such moral certainty."
— David Hare

"It strikes me often while I am in Iran that were Christian evangelicals to take a tour of Iran today, they might find it the model for an ideal society they seek in America. Replace Allah with God, Mohammad with Jesus, keep the same public and private notions of chastity, sin, salvation, and God's will, and a Christian Republic is born."
— Hooman Majd (The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran)

"A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt be the repository of hope?"
— Joyce Carol Oates (Faithless)