Quotes from John Irving

God creates us out of love, but we don't want God, or we don't believe in Him, or we pay very poor attention to Him. Nevertheless, God continues to love us—at least, He continues to try to get our attention. Pastor Merrill made religion seem reasonable. And the trick of having faith, he said, was that it was necessary to believe in God without any great or even remotely reassuring evidence that we don't inhabit a godless universe.

POKUD TI NA N??EM ZÁLEŽÍ, MUSÍÅ  SI TO CHRÁNIT; POKUD MÁÅ  TO Å TÄšSTÍ, ŽE JSI NAÅ EL ZPÅ®SOB ŽIVOTA, KTERÝ TI VYHOVUJE, MUSÍÅ  NAJÍT ODVAHU HO ŽÍT.

Here was the world-famous novelist with her penchant for detail; yet, in her observations of a prostitute with a customer, she had failed to come away with the most important detail of all. She could never identify the murderer; she could barely describe him. She'd made a point of not looking at him!

Ruth Cole was a novelist; novelists are not at their best when they go off half-cocked. She believed that she would prepare what she was going to tell the police - preferably in writing.

Finches are seed eaters, but Dr. Daruwalla didn't know this, nor did the doctor know that the green parrot perching on the vine had feet with two toes pointing forward and two backward. These were the details he missed, and they contributed to the growing list of things he didn't know. This was the kind of Everyman he was—a little lost, a little misinformed (or uninformed), almost everywhere he ever was.

A what?" said Egg. No doubt he thought that an inferiority complex was a weapon; sometimes, I guess, it is.

As a fourteen-year-old, he'd not been old enough to have sympathy for her—for either the child or the adult that she was.

not simple intolerance but the tolerance of intolerance, which allows the intolerance to persist.

Aren't eccentricities fairly common among overachievers.

As for Dr. Zajac's modest contribution to the ongoing pollution of the Charles River… well, let's be fair… In his hopelessly old-fashioned opinion, a lot worse than dogshit was dumped into the Charles on daily basis.

Jenny felt that her education was merely a polite way to bide time, as if she were really a cow, being prepared only for the insertion of the device for artificial insemination. Her

There weren't so many transvestite prostitutes in Oaxaca in those days; Flor really stood out, and not only because she was tall. She was almost beautiful; what was beautiful about her truly wasn't affected by the softest-looking trace of a mustache on her upper lip, though Lupe noticed it.

It's rare when there's something we can do for ourselves which also pleases someone else.

Okay," I said. There are these moments when you see the course of your life unfolding, and you feel powerless to alter it.

Lupe began to recite a list of reasons. "One: love of dogs," she started. "Two: to be stars—in a circus, we might be famous. Three: because the parrot man will come visit us, and our future—" She stopped for a second. "His future, anyway," Lupe said, pointing to her brother. "His future is in the parrot man's hands—I just know it is, circus or no circus.

Good night you Kings of New England. You Princes of Maine. Who knows what book this quote comes from?

Always be suspicious of easy work, Dr. Wilbur Larch once said to Homer Wells.

Like the rooftop dogs, they were lost souls—they were running wild, or they drifted around town like ghosts.

wherever Melony went, she would not be without guidance, she would not be without love, without faith; she had a good book with her. If only she'll keep reading it, and reading it

I have digressed, which is also the kind of writer I would become.

From that moment on, he would never stop seeing her, not in his minds eye - not whenever he closed his eyes and tried to sleep. She would always be there.

It won't take much of a city to be a city for me

Treading water, a little dog-paddling—it's a lot like writing a novel, Clark," the dump reader told his former student. "It feels like you're going a long way, because it's a lot of work, but you're basically covering old ground—you're hanging out in familiar territory.

But Vienna was in its death phase; it lay still and let me look at it, and think about it, and look again. In a living city, I could never have noticed so much. Living cities don't hold still.