697 Quotes by John Irving

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

Did the rhythm of the train on the tracks somehow unravel her and make her behave out of character? Was she altered in transit, when her feet were not upon the ground?

Ad majorem Dei gloriam – to the greater glory of God.

And the thing about being in love,” Wally said to Angel, “is that you can’t force anyone. It’s natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you have to let everything happen to them. You can’t interfere with people you love any more than you’re supposed to interfere with people you don’t even know. And that’s hard,” he added, “because you often feel like interfering – you want to be the one who makes the plans.

We don’t always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly – as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth – the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives.

Jenny felt that her education was merely a polite way to bide time, as if she were really a cow, being prepared only for the insertion of the device for artificial insemination. Her.

Now and forever,” Juan Diego said, more confidently. He knew this was a promise to himself – to seize every opportunity that looked like the future, from this moment forward.

It was a deus-ex-machina world!

It seems to me that people who don’t learn as easily as others suffer from a kind of learning disability – there is something different about the way they comprehend unfamiliar material – but I fail to see how this disability is improved by psychiatric consultation. What seems to be lacking is a technical ability that those of us called ‘good students’ are born with. Someone should concretely study these skills and teach them. What does a shrink have to do with the process?