John Irving Quotes

Almost none of them understood Great Expectations or David Copperfield, anyway. They were not only too young for the Dickensian language, they were also too young to comprehend the usual language of St. Cloud’s. What mattered to Dr. Larch was the idea of reading aloud – it was a successful soporific for the children who didn’t know what they were listening to, and for those few who understood the words and the story, then the evening reading provided them with a way to leave St. Cloud’s in their dreams, in their imaginations.
Dickens was a personal favorite of Dr. Larch; it was no accident, of course, that both Great Expectations and David Copperfield were concerned with orphans. (‘What in the hell else would you read to an orphan?’ Dr. Larch inquired in his journal.)

What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us are wrapped up in parentheses.

Just because you're sober, don't think you're a good driver, Cookie.

The former stewardess glared at her ex-pilot husband as if he had been speaking, and thinking, in the absence of sufficient oxygen.

She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything — maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.

I'll tell you what's wrong with dumb-shit patriotism — it's delusional! It signifies nothing but the American need to win

He wrote Helen that "a part of adolescence is feeling that there's no one else around you who's enough like yourself to understand you."

She drew the line at television. It took no effort to watch – it was infinitely more beneficial to the soul, and to the intelligence, to read or to listen – and what she imagined there was on TV appalled her.

Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!

In this dirty-minded world you are either somebody's wife or somebody's whore, or fast on your way to becoming one or the other.

…there is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old…

A person's faith goes at its own pace. The trouble with church is the service. A service is conducted for a mass audience. Just when I start to like the hymn, everyone plops down to pray. Just when I start to hear the prayer, everyone pops up to sing. And what does the stupid sermon have to do with God? Who knows what God thinks of current events? Who cares?

They all settled into being the kind of friends when they heard from each other.... or when they occasionally got together. And when they were not in touch, they did not think of one another.

You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.

Amy Martin (ladysky) and Daniel Baciagalupo had a month to spend on Charlotte Turner's island in Georgian Bay; it was their wilderness way of getting to know each other before their life together in Toronto began. We don't always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly — as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth — the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives.
Little Joe was gone, but not a day passed in Daniel Baciagalupo's life when Joe wasn't loved or remembered. The cook had been murdered in his bed, but Dominic Baciagalupo had had the last laugh on the cowboy. Ketchum's left hand would lvie forever in Twisted River, and Six-Pack had known what to do with the rest of her old friend