John Irving Quotes

108 Sourced Quotes

He wrote Helen that "a part of adolescence is feeling that there's no one else around you who's enough like yourself to understand you."

John Irving
She felt detached from her family, and thought it strange how they had lavished so much attention on her, as a child, and then at some appointed, prearranged time they seemed to stop the flow of affection and being the expectations - as if, for a brief phrase, you were expected to absorb love (and get enough), and then, for a much longer and more serious phase, you were expected to fulfill certain obligations.

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

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

John Irving
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.

John Irving
The gardener had a dread of small women; he'd always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.

John Irving
The consequences of sex are often more memorable than the act itself.

John Irving
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
In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.

John Irving
Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.

John Irving
They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.

John Irving
How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.

John Irving
My dear boy, please don't put a label on me—don't make me a category before you get to know me!

John Irving
All I say is: Let us leave les folles alone; let's just leave them be. Don't judge them. You are not superior to them - don't put them down.

John Irving
He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson

John Irving
A writer is a vehicle. I feel the story I am writing existed before I existed; I'm just the slob who finds it, and rather clumsily tries to do it, and the characters, justice.

John Irving
You live your life at the time you live it — you don't have much of an overview when what's happening to you is still happening.

John Irving
People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both; yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.

John Irving
When however small a measure of jealousy is mixed with misunderstanding, there is going to be trouble.

John Irving
So we dream on. Thus we invent our lives. We give ourselves a sainted mother, we make our father a hero; and someone's older brother and someone's older sister – they become our heroes too. We invent what we love and what we fear. There is always a brave lost brother – and a little lost sister, too. We dream on and on: the best hotel, the perfect family, the resort life. And our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them.

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

John Irving
In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?

John Irving
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.

John Irving
Ted Seabrooke, my wrestling coach, had a kind of Nietzschean effect on me in terms of not just his estimation of my limited abilities, but his decidedly philosophical stance about how to conduct your life, what you should do to compensate for your limitations. This was essential to me, both as a student—and not a good one—and as a wrestler who was not a natural athlete but who had found something he loved.

John Irving
People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.

John Irving
Loving someone as a parent can produce a cloud that conceals from vision what correct behavior is.

John Irving
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
It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious. Prostitutes know this too.

John Irving
The history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories.

John Irving