100 Mind-Blowing Quotes By John Irving On Life, Love, Courage, Talent And More
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.
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.
My life is a reading list.
Keep passing the open windows.
They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.
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.
In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us -- not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.
The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.
People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.
Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else's religion practiced on us.
Imagining something is better than remembering something.
It's not god who's fucked up, it's the screamers who say they believe in him and who claim to pursue their ends in his holy name.
In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases
A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy
It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don't expect me to change.
Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean––make sure they know what they mean!
When time passes, it's the people who knew you whom you want to see; they're the ones you can talk to. When enough time passes, what's it matter what they did to you?
…the consequences of sex are often more memorable than the act itself.
You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.
Life is serious but art is fun!
… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.
Logic is relative.
All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.
Half my life is an act of revision.
All his life he would hold this moment as exemplary of what love was. It was not wanting anything more, nor was it expecting people to exceed what they had just accomplished; it was simply feeling so complete.
