John Irving Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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Imagination, he realized, came harder than memory.

John Irving
You can't learn everything you need to know legally.

John Irving
Imagining something is better than remembering something.

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

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

John Irving
Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy.

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

John Irving
A sentence boiled in her, but she could not yet see it clearly.

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

John Irving
Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax..

John Irving
We will often do anything to pretend that nothing is on our minds.

John Irving
We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.

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

John Irving
Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!

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

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

John Irving
Being afraid you'll look like a coward is the worst reason for doing anything.

John Irving
You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.

John Irving
The excitement of anticipation was *almost* equal to the thrill of lovemaking...

John Irving
There are few things as seemingly untouched by the real world as a child asleep.

John Irving
Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.

John Irving
A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy

John Irving
Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually; and almost everyone needs to.

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

John Irving
… but only because exhaustion is a life-sign; it is at least a form of being human.

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

John Irving
There is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.

John Irving
Half my life is an act of revision; more than half the act is performed with small changes.

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

John Irving
Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.

John Irving