The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (1926)
“The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.”
“I suppose that's one of the ironies of life doing the wrong thing at the right moment.”
Source: The Summing Up (1938), p. 297
“Irony, forsooth! Guard yourself, Engineer, from the sort of irony that thrives up here”
Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 5
Context: Irony, forsooth! Guard yourself, Engineer, from the sort of irony that thrives up here; guard yourself altogether from taking on their mental attitude! Where irony is not a direct and classic device of oratory, not for a moment equivocal to a healthy mind, it makes for depravity, it becomes a drawback to civilization, an unclean traffic with the forces of reaction, vice and materialism.
"The State of the Theatre" an interview by Henry Brandon in Harpers 221 (November 1960)
Gardons-nous de l'ironie en jugeant. De toutes les dispositions de l'esprit, l'ironie est la moins intelligente.
Notebook entry, February 24, 1848, cited from Les cahiers de Sainte-Beuve (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1876) p. 75; Christopher Prendergast The Classic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) p. 244.
“Irony is the glory of slaves.”
