John Irving Quotes

“If you care about something you have to protect it – If you’re lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.”

“Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean—make sure they know what they mean!”

“The more clearly one sees this world; the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.”

““People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.””

“You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I'm going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life”

“My life is a reading list.”

“Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.”

“Life is serious but art is fun!”

“All his life he would hold this moment as exemplary of what love was. It was not wanting anything more, nor was it expecting people to exceed what they had just accomplished; it was simply feeling so complete.”

“Half my life is an act of revision.”

“Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.”

“How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.”

“When time passes, it's the people who knew you whom you want to see; they're the ones you can talk to. When enough time passes, what's it matter what they did to you?”

“Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.”

“(In reference to Vermont's Act 60): This is Marxism. It's leveling everything by decimating what works … It's that vindictive 'We've suffered, and now we're going to take money from your kid and watch you squirm'… There's a minority which is an open target in this country which no one protects, and that's rich people.”

“You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.”

“To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread, we were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.”

“Keep passing the open windows.”

“We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.”

“Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.”

“Never confuse faith, or belief — of any kind — with something even remotely intellectual.”

“In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us -- not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.”

“Imagining something is better than remembering something.”

“Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else's religion practiced on us.”

“A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy”

“In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.”

“It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don't expect me to change.”

“The desire to never leave your side, the desire to never see you again. The desire to see your face asleep on the pillow beside my face and to see your eyes open in the morning when I lie next to you—just watching you, waiting for you to wake up.”

“You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.”

“If watching television doesn't hasten death, it surely manages to make death very inviting; for television so shamelessly sentimentalizes and romanticizes death that it makes the living feel they have missed something - just by staying alive.”

“…the consequences of sex are often more memorable than the act itself.”

“… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.”

“Logic is relative.”

“All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.”

“You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.”

“Human beings are remarkable - at what we can learn to live with. If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough, could we? What else makes us strong?”

“I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.”

“Being afraid you'll look like a coward is the worst reason for doing anything.”

“If you don't feel that you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then probably what you are doing isn't very vital.”

“Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can't even remember having met you”

“Sorrow floats.”

“I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes – toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings.”

“Safer than we are.” I told Franny. “Safer than love.” “let me tell ya kid,” Franny said to me, squeezing my hand. “Everything’s safer than love.”

“when however small a measure of jealousy is mixed with misunderstanding, there is always going to be trouble.”

“…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.”

“We will often do anything to pretend that nothing is on our minds.”

“He also knew that rivals are best unmanned by being ignored.”

“Good habits are worth being fanatical about.”

“O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.”

“I have learned that the consequences of our past actions are always interesting; I have learned to view the present with a forward-looking eye.”

“We are formed by what we desire”

“Death, it seems," Garp wrote, "does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic.”

“It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound.”

“It's a no-win argument - that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.”

“wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.”

“When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark.”

“If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?”

“Don't forget this, too: Rumors aren't interested in the unsensational story; rumors don't care what's true.”

“If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough.”

“If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves.”

“Owen meany who rarely wasted words and who had the conversation-stopping habit of dropping remarks like coins into a deep pool of water… remarks that sank, like truth, to the bottom of the pool where they would remain untouchable.”

“A woman half dressed seemed to have some power, but a man was simply not as handsome as when he was naked, and not as secure as when he was clothed.”

“Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.”

“The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child.”

“Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.”

“And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.”