John Irving Quotes

"If you live long enough, Bill - it's a world of epilogues," Richard Abbott said.

Human beings are remarkable - at what we can learn to live with. If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough, could we? What else makes us strong?

The hardest thing to accept about the passage of time is that the people who mattered most to us are all wrapped up in parenthesis

"My dear boy, " Miss Frost said sharply. "My dear boy, please don't put a label on me - don't make a category before you get to know me!"

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

He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.

Imagining something is better than remembering something.

The gardener had a dread of small women; he'd always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.

woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil.

Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.

O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.

If you think you are capable of living without writing, do not write,

Of course: because it was in one of the camps that he went blind. They had performed some failed experiment on his eyes in the camp.
‘No, not summer camp,’ Franny had to tell Lilly, who had always been afraid of being sent to summer camp, and was unsurprised to hear that they tortured the campers.

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.

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.