Quoted Lewis Hyde, whose pamphlet on John Berryman and alcohol he had read in his early months at Granada House: “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage.” Then he continued: This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing….[ I]rony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. D.T. Max
Some Similar Quotes
  1. Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony. - Douglas Coupland

  2. 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]... - Haruki Murakami

  3. The irony of life is that those who wear masks often tell us more truths than those with open faces. - Marie Lu

  4. Thank heaven for people who are satisfied with facts that conform to the reality they wish to believe. - Gary Inbinder

  5. Even things that are true can be proved. - Oscar Wilde

More Quotes By D.T. Max
  1. Quoted Lewis Hyde, whose pamphlet on John Berryman and alcohol he had read in his early months at Granada House: “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage.” Then he continued:...

  2. Grammar, he saw, was agreement, community, consensus.

  3. When David Markson wrote in June to complain about an author's getting an award he though should have been his, Wallace gently warned him away from the pitfall of envy: "Mostly I try to remember how lucky I am to be able to write, and...

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