697 Quotes by John Irving

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.

What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life – to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?

Homer Wells, listening to Big Dot Taft, felt like her voice – dulled. Wally was away, Candy was away, and the anatomy of a rabbit was, after Clara, no challenge; the migrants, whom he’d so eagerly anticipated, were just plain hard workers; life was just a job. He had grown up without noticing when? Was there nothing remarkable in the transition?

I was thinking I had noticed a curious lack of either enthusiasm or bitterness in the account of the world by Theobald’s sister. There was in her story the flatness one associates with a storyteller who is accepting of unhappy endings, as if her life and her companions had never been exotic to her – as if they had always been staging a ludicrous and doomed effort at reclassification.

There’s a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There’s a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.

The student and the teacher had contrasting ideas about the sentence, which was: “There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

I don’t want you to describe to me – not ever – what you were doing to that poor boy to make him sound like that; but if you ever do it again, please cover his mouth with your hand.

A book feels true when it feels true,” she said to him, impatiently. “A book’s true when you can say, ‘Yeah! That’s just how damn people behave all the time.

As Garp put it, ‘You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.’ Even if these so-called endings and beginnings are illusions.