John Irving Quotes

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.

A woman half dressed seemed to have some power, but a man was simply not as handsome as when he was naked, and not as secure as when he was clothed.

In this dirty minded world, you are either someone's wife or someone's whore. And if you're not either people think there is something wrong with you....but there is nothing wrong with me

Wherever Melony went, she would not be without guidance, she would not be without love, without faith; she had a good book with her. If only she kept reading it and reading it...

People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both; yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.

Someone who hasn't read a novel doesn't really know what it's about, William.

Is it a democratic society that condemns people to the accident of conception? What are we-monkeys? If you expect people to be responsible for their children, you have to give them the right to choose whether or not to have children. What are you people thinking of? You're not only crazy! You're ogres!

You can't learn everything you need to know legally.

You're nice,' Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. 'And you're my oldest friend.' But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends.

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

Grant us safe lodging, and holy rest,” Mrs. Grogan was saying, “and peace at last.” Amen, thought Wilbur Larch, the Saint of St. Cloud’s, who was seventy-something, and an ether addict, and who felt that he’d come a long way and still had a long way to go.

It seemed to Dr. Daruwalla that his story was the opposite of universal; his story was simply strange - the doctor himself was singularly foreign.

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.)

YOU LET ME DROWN!” Owen said. “YOU DIDN’T DO ANYTHING! YOU JUST WATCHED ME DROWN! I’M ALREADY DEAD!” he told us. “REMEMBER THAT: YOU LET ME DIE.

It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.