Quotes from John Irving

Nuviliame tik patys save. Tur?tume pasistengti kuo labiau sumažinti vis? t? atsakomyb?, kuri? jau?iam?s es? skolingi kitiems.

It's not the tattoos, my dear boy," Jack's father said, standing naked before him—the shocking white of William's hands and face and neck and penis being the only parts of him that weren't an almost uniform blue-black, some of which had faded to gray. "It's everything I truly heard and felt—it's everything I ever loved! It's not the tattoos that marked me.

We all go through a phase—it lasts a lifetime, for some of us—when we're embarrassed by our parents; we don't want them hanging around us because we're afraid they'll do or say something that will make us feel ashamed of them.

If you want to worry about something, you ought to worry about how Guadalupe was looking at you. Like she's still making up her mind about you. Guadalupe hasn't decided about you," the clairvoyant child had told him.

Elliot told me that bigots could be "slippery" if you accused them outright.

The past is everlasting.

As often as I feel certain that God exists, I feel as often at a loss to say what difference it makes—that He exists—or even: that to believe in God, which I do, raises more questions than it presents answers. Thus, when I am feeling my most faithful, I also feel full of a few hard questions that I would like to put to God—I mean, critical questions of the How-Can-He, How-Could-He, How-Dare-You variety.

It was best not to ask Pepe if reading or Jesus had saved him, or which one had saved him more.

I walked all the way through the Heldenplatz – the Plaza of Heroes – and stood where thousands of cheering fascists had greeted Hitler, once. I thought that fanatics would always have an audience; all one might hope to influence was the size of the audience.

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.

It sounds the same to me, Kid," Molly said. "The new lift takes you to the same old place. It's the same trip, just a faster ride—it's no more or less depressing than it ever was," she added.

Le romancier est comme un médecin qui ne s'occuperait que des incurables. Et nous sommes tous des incurables.

And feeling like a failed sexual predator, because of pregnant Mary…

Americans are suckers for an English accent.

How I live matters more than what I do. I have ambitions for the quality of how I live. I have no ambition for making money ...and I'd have time to read enough to be a constant source of information, ideas and language.

When they weren't praying, they did what schoolgirls everywhere do. They laughed, they shrieked, they burst into hysterical sobs – all for no apparent reason… The schoolgirls also played the worst Western music imaginable, and they took a surfeit of baths – so many baths that the traditional inn where Wallingford and Evelyn Arbuthnot stayed was repeatedly running out of hot water.

Ever since the Christmas of '53, I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection; the so-called spirit of giving can be as greedy as receiving—Christmas is our time to be aware of what we lack, of who's not home.

There is often a defining experience that marks any significant change in the course of a person's life.

It was Owen Meany who taught me that any good book is always in motion—from the general to the specific, from the particular to the whole, and back again. Good reading—and good writing about reading—moves the same way.

A loving couple will say things to each other - you know, Danny - just to make each other feel good about a situation, even if the situation isn't good, or it they shouldn't feel good about i, Ketchum said. A loving couple will make up their own rules, as if these made-up rules were as reliable or counted for as much as the rules everyone else tried to live by - if you know what I mean.

What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life—to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?

GUYS," Owen Meany said. That spring, less than a month before Gravesend Academy's graduation exercises, the TV showed us a map of Thailand; five thousand U.S. Marines and fifty jet fighters were being

As Nora had also said, "Nothing will change." She meant the Catholic Church and the Republicans, but—according to Em—the Republicans would get worse.

IT DOESN'T MATTER WHERE YOU LEARNED IT—IT'S A GIFT. 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.