John Irving Quotes

There's nothing as scary as the future.

Love was certainly not safe - not ever.

It seems to me that people who don’t learn as easily as others suffer from a kind of learning disability — there is something different about the way they comprehend unfamiliar material — but I fail to see how this disability is improved by psychiatric consultation. What seems to be lacking is a technical ability that those of us called ‘good students’ are born with. Someone should concretely study these skills and teach them. What does a shrink have to do with the process?

"Did Owen say your grandmother was a banshee?"

"He said she was 'wailing like a banshee,'" I explained.

Dan got out the dictionary , then; he was clucking his tongue and shaking his head, and laughing at himself saying, "That boy! What a boy! Brilliant but preposterous!" And that was the first time I learned, literally, what a banshee was — a banshee, in Irish folklore, is a female spirit whose wailing is a sign that a loved one will soon die.

Once again, Jack reached for her hand. It was the only thing he knew how to do. As it would turn out, it was about the only thing he reall knew.

Imagining something is better than remembering something.

. . .There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments . . .

The chairman of the state board of medical examiners was a retired physician who thought that President Teddy Roosevelt was the only other man in the world besides himself who had not been made from a banana.

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

An affection that was calculated was never trustworthy.

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.

Isn't it amazing? The Americans have so many good afterthoughts!

This was not of the nature of a Christlike lesson for Owen Meany to learn, as he lay in the manger, that someone you hate can give you a hard-on.

I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. They are gone, and I resume the journey of my story.’ (David Copperfield)

“But all that night he lay awake because the phantoms of those days were not gone. Like the tiny, terrible holes in the prophylactics, the phantoms of those days were not easy to detect — and their meaning was unknown — but they were there.

I think now that is the nature of hymns-they make us want to repeat them...they are a part of any service, and often the only part of a funeral service, that makes us feel everything is acceptable.