Quotes from book

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!”

“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!”

“This was not of the nature of a Christlike lesson for Owen Meany to learn, as he lay in the manger, that someone you hate can give you a hard-on.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“My life is a reading list.”

“Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.”

“Logic is relative.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it; it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action”

“As it was, things went from bad to worse, as they often will when amateurs are involved in an activity that they perform in bad temper – or in a hurry.”