John Irving Quotes

Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.

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

Men who believe in good and evil, and who believe that good should win, should watch for those moments when it is possible to play God

In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.

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

The Winkles appeared to greet the morning vigorously. Although Homer had never heard human beings make love, or moose mate, he knew perfectly well that the Winkles were mating. If Dr. Larch had been present, he might have drawn new conclusions concerning the Winkles' inability to produce offspring. He would have concluded that the violent athleticism of their coupling simply destroyed, or scared to death, every available egg and sperm.