John Irving - Love Quotes

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But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.

John Irving
If you are careful,' Garp wrote, 'if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day; what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane.

John Irving
There was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.

John Irving
And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.

John Irving
If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?

John Irving
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.

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

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
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