John Irving: Trending quotes

“Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!”

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

“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!”

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

“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”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“My life is a reading list.”

“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.”