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.”

Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989)

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

Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany

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

Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989)

John Irving book A Son of the Circus

Source: A Son of the Circus

““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”

Variant: People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.
Source: The Cider House Rules

“It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.”

Source: The World According to Garp

John Irving Quotes about life

“My life is a reading list.”

Source: The Hotel New Hampshire

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

Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany

“Life is serious but art is fun!”

Source: Until I Find You (2005), ch. 25, p. 493

“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.”

Source: A Widow for One Year

“What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.”

John Irving Quotes about people

“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.”

Source: The Cider House Rules

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

Source: A Widow for One Year

“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?”

Source: The Cider House Rules

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

Source: The Cider House Rules

“(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.”

“The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.”

[Salon, News, July 1, 1998, http://www.salon.com/news/1998/07/01news.html]

John Irving: Trending quotes

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

Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany

“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.”

Source: The Hotel New Hampshire, ch. 11

“They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.”

The Hotel New Hampshire (1981), ch. 6

John Irving Quotes

“Keep passing the open windows.”

Source: The World According to Garp

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

Source: The Hotel New Hampshire

John Irving book Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

Source: Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

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

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

Source: The Cider House Rules

“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.”

Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), ch. 9

“Imagining something is better than remembering something.”

Source: Until I Find You

“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.”

Source: The World According to Garp]] (1978)

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

Source: My Movie Business: A Memoir

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

Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany

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

Source: The World According to Garp, ch. 19

“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.”

Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany

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

Source: Until I Find You

“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.”

Source: The Hotel New Hampshire

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

Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany

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

Source: A Widow for One Year

Source: The Cider House Rules

“Logic is relative.”

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

Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany

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

Source: The World According to Garp

“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?”

Source: The World According to Garp

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

Source: The Hotel New Hampshire

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

Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany

“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.”

Source: The Cider House Rules

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

Source: The Hotel New Hampshire

“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.”

Source: The Hotel New Hampshire

“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.”

Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany

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

Source: The Hotel New Hampshire

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

Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany

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

Source: A Widow for One Year

John Irving book Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

Source: Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

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

“Good habits are worth being fanatical about.”

Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany

“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.”

Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany

“We are formed by what we desire”

Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany

“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.”

Source: In One Person

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

Source: The World According to Garp

“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.”

Source: A Widow for One Year

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

Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany

“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?”

Source: Until I Find You

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

Source: My Movie Business: A Memoir

“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.”

Source: In One Person

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

Source: The Hotel New Hampshire

John Irving book Last Night in Twisted River

Source: Last Night in Twisted River

“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.”

Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany

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

Source: The World According to Garp

“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.”

Source: The World According to Garp

“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.”

Source: In One Person