Quotes from John Irving

Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once

Quoting Kurt Vonnegut: Free Enterprise is much too hard on the old and the sick and the shy and the poor and the stupid, and on people nobody likes.

The girl looked too frightened to speak. Then she said: "I know you have to give my mother the flag—at the funeral. I know what my mother's gonna do—when you give her the flag. She said she's gonna spit on you," the pregnant sister told Owen. "And I know her—she will!" the girl said. "She'll spit in your face!" "IT HAPPENS, SOMETIMES," Owen said.

HE'S IN INTELLIGENCE," Owen said. Dick appeared impressed, but—like his hatred—the feeling drifted and passed. "You carry a gun?" Dick asked me. "NOT THAT KIND OF INTELLIGENCE," said Owen Meany, and Dick closed his eyes again—there being, in his view, clearly no intelligence that didn't carry a gun.

I guess that's just one of the reasons it's the most beautiful bar in the world, in my opinion: it has the grace to make no one feel self-conscious about any unhappiness.

THINK OF HARDY AS A MAN WHO WAS ALMOST RELIGIOUS, AS A MAN WHO CAME SO CLOSE TO BELIEVING IN GOD THAT WHEN HE REJECTED GOD, HIS REJECTION MADE HIM FEROCIOUSLY BITTER.

Father was pretty good on the telephone; he counted the holes. Even so, Father still got a lot of wrong numbers, and they made him so cross that he invariably shouted to the persons on the receiving end of his calls—as if the wrong numbers had been their fault. "Jesus God!" he would holler. "You're the wrong number!" Thus, in this small way, did my Father and his Louisville Slugger terrorize a portion of New York.

the first chair headed down the mountain would be Molly's last chairlift. Willy

What woman wants to hear someone say what her husband is thinking? What guy is going to be happy hearing what's on his wife's mind?

In modern times, in my opinion, either everything is a moral question or there are no more moral questions. Nowadays, there are no compromises or there are only compromises. Never influenced, I keep my vigil. There is no letting up.

He who once persecuted us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy.' And they glorified God because of me." How well I know that feeling! I trust in God because of Owen Meany. It

According to Frank, religion is just another kind of taxidermy.

As Jack would discover, it's remarkable how you can miss people you barely knew—even those people you never especially liked.

Owen and I were eleven; we had no other way to articulate what we felt about what had happened to my mother. He gave me his baseball cards, but he really wanted them back, and I gave him my stuffed armadillo, which I certainly hoped he'd give back to me—all because it was impossible for us to say to each other how we really felt. How did it feel to hit a ball that hard—and then realize that the ball had killed your best friend's mother?

I just love it when certain people feel free to tell writers what the correct words are. When I hear the same people use impact as a verb, I want to throw up!

Some unexplainable things are real.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS COUNTRY?" Owen Meany asked. "WE SHOULD ALL BE AT HOME, LOOKING AFTER PEOPLE LIKE THIS. INSTEAD, WE'RE SENDING PEOPLE LIKE THIS TO VIETNAM!

The rain washed over the soggy Steering campus in sheets; the storm sewers bogged and the out-of-state cars plowed through the streets like yachts in a squall.

If pride was a sin, thought Dr. Larch, the greatest sin was moral pride. He

Ce n'était pas là l'un des points forts de Garp : la tolérance à l'égard des intolérants. Les fous le rendaient fou. On aurait dit qu'il se sentait personnellement révolté de les voir céder à la folie en partie, sans doute, parce que lui même devait si souvent lutter pour se comporter de façon sensée.

In the life of a man," wrote Marcus Aurelius, "his time is but a moment . . .

Don't you see, Johnny? If he could, he would cut off his hands for you—that's how it makes him feel, to have touched that baseball bat, to have swung that bat with those results. It's how we all feel—you and me and Owen. We've lost a part of ourselves.

My becoming a Canadian citizen was part of the plot.

YOU SEE? IT'S EASY. YOU TAKE HIS HIGH STANDARDS FOR STORIES THAT ARE 'EXCEPTIONAL' AND YOU PUT THAT TOGETHER WITH HIS BELIEF THAT 'NOTHING BEARS OUT IN PRACTICE WHAT IT PROMISES INCIPIENTLY,' AND THERE'S YOUR THESIS! ACTUALLY, THERE IS HIS THESIS—ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS FILL IN THE EXAMPLES.