Top 15 John Irving Quotes

When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time — the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes — when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever — there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.

If you care about something you have to protect it – If you’re lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.

You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.

Your memory is a monster; you forget — it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you — and summons them to your recall with will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!

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.

They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.

Keep passing the open windows.

My life is a reading list.

We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.

It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.

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

Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.

Never confuse faith, or belief — of any kind — with something even remotely intellectual.

People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.

The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.