697 Quotes by John Irving

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

Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult – in any way – something in your childhood dies.

It’s a no-win argument – that business of what we’re born with and what our environment does to us. And it’s a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.

As for Jenny, she felt only that women – just like men – should at least be able to make conscious decisions about the course of their lives; if that made her a feminist, she said, then she guessed she was one.

What a power I had discovered! I felt certain I could refill those bleacher seats – one day, I was sure, I could “see” everyone who’d been there; I could find that special someone my mother had waved to, at the end.

Jack realized that when you’re happy – especially when it’s the first time in your life – you think of things that would never have occurred to you when you were unhappy.

As a self-described Guadalupe girl, Lupe was sensitive to Guadalupe being overshadowed by the “Mary Monster.” Lupe not only meant that Mary was the most dominant of the Catholic Church’s “stable” of virgins; Lupe believed that the Virgin Mary was also “a domineering virgin.

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 a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!

Just because you’re sober, don’t think you’re a good driver, Cookie.