John Irving citations

Page 2

“Je ne mène pas une vie de fou. Je n'ai pas besoin de "dissiper les nuages" tous les soirs, ni toutes les semaines, ni même une fois par mois. La plupart du temps, le soir, je ne regarde même pas mon téléphone. D'autres fois pourtant, cet appareil semble convoquer tous les gens injoignables de mon passé. […] Tel est le téléphone, certains soirs : le passé injoignable, les morts qui réclament de donner leur avis.”

“[…] l’art du romancier est la capacité d’imaginer de façon vraie.”

“L'un de ses détracteurs ayant affirmé que ce qu'il faisait ne plaisait sûrement pas à Dieu, Mauriac eut cette réponse admirable : "Dieu, monsieur, se soucie peu de ce que nous écrivons; mais lorsque c'est bien écrit, il s'en sert."”

“Eric [Ross] et moi […] n'avons pas aimé et n'aimons toujours pas Vienne. C'est une petite ville; son antisémitisme notoire n'est qu'un aspect parmi d'autres de son provincialisme mesquin, où règne une xénophobie généralisée, une défiance qui peut aller jusqu'à la haine de tous les éléments extérieurs. "Des geht bei uns nicht", disent les Autrichiens. "Cela ne s'accorde pas avec nous". le mot Ausländer, étranger, y est toujours péjoratif. Quant à la Gemütlichkeit viennoise, c'est une attraction touristique, la fausse gentillesse d'un peuple fondamentalement unhöflich.”

“Eric et moi, jeunes Américains idéalistes, ne pouvions rien faire de plus que de tendre un miroir à cette inexplicable tolérance de l'intolérance.”

“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?”

“Half my life is an act of revision.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“…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?”