John Irving - People Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

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We don't always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly—as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth—the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives

John Irving
Like many successful people he made good use of disappointments - responding to them with energy, with near-frenzied activity, rather than needing to recover from them.

John Irving
Kids are beautiful, man. And they know much more than grownups think they know. Kids are just perfect people until grownups get their hands on them.

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

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

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

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
Crazy people made him crazy. It was as if he personally resented them giving into madness - in part, because he so frequently labored to behave sanely. When some people gave up the labor of sanity, or failed at it, Garp suspected them of not trying hard enough.

John Irving
The kind of people claiming to be in communication with God today … they are enough to drive a real Christian crazy!

John Irving
I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave - and nothing but laughter to console them with.

John Irving
The thing that is most hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most wind up in parentheses.

John Irving
When time passes, it's the people who knew you whom you want to see; they're the ones you can talk to. When enough time passes, what's it matter what they did to you?

John Irving
Is it a democratic society that condemns people to the accident of conception? What are we-monkeys? If you expect people to be responsible for their children, you have to give them the right to choose whether or not to have children. What are you people thinking of? You're not only crazy! You're ogres!

John Irving
In reference to Vermont's Act 60:
This is Marxism. It's leveling everything by decimating what works... It's that vindictive 'We've suffered, and now we're going to take money from your kid and watch you squirm'... There's a minority which is an open target in this country which no one protects, and that's rich people.

John Irving
He was one of those people things came easily to, but he did little to demonstrate that he deserved to be gifted.

John Irving