John Irving: Trending quotes

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John Irving: 194 quotes15 likes

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

John Irving book A Prayer for Owen Meany

Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany

“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!”

John Irving book A Prayer for Owen Meany

Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989)

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

John Irving book A Son of the Circus

Source: A Son of the Circus

“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.”

John Irving book A Prayer for Owen Meany

Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany

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

John Irving book A Prayer for Owen Meany

Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989)

“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”

John Irving book The World According to Garp

Source: The World According to Garp

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

John Irving book The Cider House Rules

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

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

John Irving book The Hotel New Hampshire

Source: The Hotel New Hampshire, ch. 11

“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 book The Cider House Rules

Source: The Cider House Rules

“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.”

John Irving book The Hotel New Hampshire

The Hotel New Hampshire (1981), ch. 6

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

John Irving book The World According to Garp

Source: The World According to Garp

“My life is a reading list.”

John Irving book A Prayer for Owen Meany

Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany

“Keep passing the open windows.”

John Irving book The Hotel New Hampshire

Source: The Hotel New Hampshire

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

John Irving book A Prayer for Owen Meany

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

“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.”

John Irving book Until I Find You

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.”

John Irving

Source: My Movie Business: A Memoir