John Irving Quotes – Quoterati

Best Quotes by John Irving (Top 10)

When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time"the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes"when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever"there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.
John Irving
You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
John Irving
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!
John Irving
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.
John Irving
Keep passing the open windows.
John Irving
It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
John Irving
Never confuse faith, or belief"of any kind"with something even remotely intellectual.
John Irving
If you are careful,' Garp wrote, 'if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day; what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane.
John Irving
In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases
John Irving
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
John Irving

More John Irving Quotes

You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
John Irving
Half my life is an act of revision.
John Irving
If you don't feel that you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then probably what you are doing isn't very vital.
John Irving
Good habits are worth being fanatical about.
John Irving
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.
John Irving
If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.
John Irving
Being afraid you'll look like a coward is the worst reason for doing anything.
John Irving
. . .There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments . . .
John Irving
And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.
John Irving
Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents' own rule.
John Irving
There was no manifestation of contemporary culture that did not indicate to my grandmother how steadfast was the nation's decline, how merciless our mental and moral deterioration, how swiftly all-embracing our final decadence. I never saw her read a book again; but she referred to books often - as if they were shrines and cathedrals of learning that television had plundered and then abandoned.
John Irving
But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.
John Irving
In our hearts... there must abide some pity for those people who have always felt themselves to be separate from even their most familiar surroundings, those people who either are foreigners or who suffer a singular point of view that makes them feel as if they're foreigners - even in their native lands. In our hearts... there also abides a certain suspicion that such people need to feel set apart from their society. But people who initiate loneliness are no less lonely than those who are suddenly surprised by loneliness, nor are they undeserving of our pity.
John Irving
The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.
John Irving
He was one of those people things came easily to, but he did little to demonstrate that he deserved to be gifted.
John Irving
To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.
John Irving
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.
John Irving