697 Quotes by John Irving

Being afraid you’ll look like a coward is the worst reason for doing anything.

Grief is contagious,” Marion began again. “I didn’t want you to catch my grief, Eddie. I really didn’t want Ruth to catch it.

What a phrase that is: ‘that explains everything!’ I know better than to think anything ‘explains everything’ today.

People regard art too highly, and history not enough.

If Garp was going to play lacrosse, Jenny thought, where would he go? Not out, because it’s dark; he’d lose the ball.

This mannerism of what he’d seen of society struck Homer Wells quite forcefully; people, even nice people – because, surely, Wally was nice – would say a host of critical things about someone to whom they would then be perfectly pleasant. At. St. Cloud’s, criticism was plainer – and harder, if not impossible, to conceal.

I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave – and nothing but laughter to console them with.

Old Lowji’s nasty remark would haunt Farrokh forever: “Immigrants are immigrants all their lives!” Once someone makes such a negative pronouncement, you might refute it but you never forget it; some ideas are so vividly planted, they become visible objects, actual things.

The way you remember or dream about your loved ones – the ones who are gone – you can’t stop their endings from jumping ahead of the rest of their stories. You don’t get to choose the chronology of what you dream, or the order of events in which you remember someone. In your mind – in your dreams, in your memories – sometimes the story begins with the epilogue.