John Irving Quotes

If watching television doesn't hasten death, it surely manages to make death very inviting; for television so shamelessly sentimentalizes and romanticizes death that it makes the living feel they have missed something - just by staying alive.

It was not the cold that made you want to rush out as soon as you'd jumped in; it was the unmeasured depth - our fear of what was on the bottom, and how far below us the bottom was.

"Bonkie bit Garp!"
Garp bit Bonkie

But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.

...but I suddenly realized what small towns are. They are places where you grow up with the peculiar — you live next to the strange and the unlikely for so long that everything and everyone become commonplace. My cousins were both small-towners and outsiders; they had not grown up with Own Meany, who was so strange to them that he inspired awe - yet they were no more likely to fall upon him, or to devise ways to torture him, than it was likely for a herd of cattle to attack a cat.

It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Bevore you can write anything, you have to notice something.

But we are not known for our ability to follow through on our unearned discoveries. We are top-of-the-water adventurers, who limit our opinions of the icebergs to what we can see.

"When people die, Vargas - I mean the people you will always remember, the ones who changed your life - they never really go away," Pepe told the young doctor.

people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.

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

In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us — not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.

Of course, apologies are rarely acceptable to true believers - or to anyone who believes in *pure* good, or in pure evil.

And never forget, there is memory.

"YOUR BOREDOM IS YOUR PROBLEM," said Owen Meany. "IT'S YOUR LACK OF IMAGINATION THAT BORES YOU. HARDY HAS THE WORLD FIGURED OUT. TESS IS DOOMED. FATE HAS IT IN FOR HER. SHE'S A VICTIM; IF YOU'RE A VICTIM, THE WORLD WILL USE YOU. WHY SHOULD SOMEONE WHO'S GOT SUCH A WORKED-OUT WAY OF SEEING THE WORLD BORE YOU? WHY SHOULDN'T YOU BE INTERESTED IN SOMEONE WHO'S WORKED OUT A WAY TO SEE THE WORLD? THAT'S WHAT MAKES WRITERS INTERESTING!"

To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread, we were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.