Quotes from John Irving

Was he nice? He didn't know. He hoped he was, but how many of us truly know?

But I tried to feel I was part of the demonstration; sadly, I didn't feel I was a part of it—I didn't feel I was part of anything. I had a 4-F deferment; I would never have to go to war, or to Canada. By the simple act of removing the first two joints of my right index finger, Owen Meany had enabled me to feel completely detached from my generation.

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

Everyone has a history, Jack.

living in a world where nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently." I

It made him furious when I suggested that anything was an "accident"—especially anything that had happened to him; on the subject of predestination, Owen Meany would accuse Calvin of bad faith. There were no accidents; there was a reason for that baseball—just as there was a reason for Owen being small, and a reason for his voice.

The last of a train of psychiatrists would claim to have rehabilitated her, but Pooh Percy may simply have emerged from analysis—and a number of institutions—too thoroughly bored with rehabilitation to be violent anymore.

In both classes, Pastor Merrill preached his doubt-is-the-essence-of-and-not-the-opposite-of-faith philosophy

but when I look at you now, I don't know who you are." I told her I occasionally had the same feeling about myself.

I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes—toward an infinity of unsatisfying and disagreeable endings. The wholly anticlimactic, unsatisfying, and disagreeable news that the Rev. Lewis Merrill was my father—not to mention the death of Owen Meany—is just one example of the condition of universal disappointment

THE summer my father bought the bear, none of us was born—we weren't even conceived: not Frank, the oldest; not Franny, the loudest; not me, the next; and not the youngest of us, Lilly and Egg. My father and mother were hometown kids who knew each other all their lives, but their "union," as Frank always called it, hadn't taken place when Father bought the bear.

that was exactly what I thought Owen Meany was, "brilliant but preposterous." As time went on—as you shall see—maybe not so preposterous.

And when he was privileged to witness the miracle of Owen Meany, my bitter father could manage no better response than to whine to me about his lost faith—his ridiculously subjective and fragile belief, which he had so easily allowed to be routed by his mean-spirited and self-imposed doubt. What a wimp he was, Pastor Merrill; but how proud I felt of my mother—that she'd had the good sense to shrug him off.

And more than beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I was thinking, when I looked back—up the nighttime mountain—at the wrecked train, lying in the snow.

Life forces enough final decisions on us," Mrs. Oastler continued. "We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.

So that's what it means to be a nonpracticing homosexual, I thought: it means I don't know what I am!

Churchill Park have their bellies turned toward the sun.

There are times when I need to read the Thirty-seventh Psalm, over and over again. Leave off from wrath, and let go displeasure: fret not thyself, else shalt thou be moved to do evil.

IF YOU'RE A VICTIM, THE WORLD WILL USE YOU.

HOW CAN YOU BE HAPPY IF YOU SPEND ALL YOUR TIME THINKING ABOUT DOING IT?" Owen asked.

was Owen Meany who told me that only white men are vain enough to believe that human beings are unique because we have souls. According to Owen, Watahantowet knew better. Watahantowet believed that animals had souls, and that even the much-abused Squamscott River had a soul—Watahantowet knew that the land he sold to my ancestors was absolutely full of spirits.

He would deliver babies. He would deliver mothers, too.

Add doom to the list, then. Especially in families, doom is "altogether common." Sorrow floats; love, too; and—in the long run—doom. It floats, too.

proposed—in