Quotes from John Irving

Owen Meany believed that "coincidence" was a stupid, shallow refuge sought by stupid, shallow people who were unable to accept the fact that their lives were shaped by a terrifying and awesome design – more powerful and unstoppable than the Yankee Flyer. (a train)

Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can't even remember having met you

O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.

Good habits are worth being fanatical about.

Safer than we are." I told Franny. "Safer than love." "let me tell ya kid," Franny said to me, squeezing my hand. "Everything's safer than love.

I have learned that the consequences of our past actions are always interesting; I have learned to view the present with a forward-looking eye.

He also knew that rivals are best unmanned by being ignored.

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

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

Oh FUCK the longings and agonies of youth.

It's a no-win argument - that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.

Death, it seems, Garp wrote, does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic.

He had heard her say, so many times, that a society that approved of making abortion illegal was a society that approved of violence against women; that making abortion illegal was simply a sanctimonious, self-righteous form of violence against women- it was just another way of legalizing violence against women, Nurse Caroline would say.

The history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories.

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

We are formed by what we desire

THAT'S WHAT POWERFUL MEN DO TO THIS COUNTRY - IT'S A BEAUTIFUL, SEXY, BREATHLESS COUNTRY, AND POWERFUL MEN USE IT TO TREAT THEMSELVES TO A THRILL! THEY SAY THEY LOVE IT BUT THEY DON'T MEAN IT. THEY SAY THINGS TO MAKE THEMSELVES APPEAR GOOD - THEY MAKE THEMSELVES APPEAR MORAL...THE COUNTRY WANTS A SAVIOUR. THE COUNTRY IS A SUCKER FOR POWERFUL MEN WHO LOOK GOOD. WE THINK THEY'RE MORALISTS AND THEN THEY JUST USE US.

It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound.

When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark.

Owen meany who rarely wasted words and who had the conversation-stopping habit of dropping remarks like coins into a deep pool of water... remarks that sank, like truth, to the bottom of the pool where they would remain untouchable.

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

Don't forget this, too: Rumors aren't interested in the unsensational story; rumors don't care what's true.

If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves.

wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.