Quotes By Author: john irving

“The time to read Madame Bovary is when your romantic hopes and desires have crashed, and you will believe that your future relationships will have disappointing – even devastating – consequences.”

“You can’t learn everything you need to know legally.”

“A person’s faith goes at its own pace. The trouble with church is the service. A service is conducted for a mass audience. Just when I start to like the hymn, everyone plops down to pray. Just when I start to hear the prayer, everyone pops up to sing. And what does the stupid sermon have to do with God? Who knows what God thinks of current events? Who cares?”

“Life,” Garp wrote, “is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead an end occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that is left is memory. But even a nihilist has memory.”

“When (The World According To) Garp was published, people who’d lost children wrote to me. ‘’I lost one, too,’’ they told me. I confessed to them that I hadn’t lost any children. I’m just a father with a good imagination. In my imagination, I lose my children every day. (afterword)”

“Many things the gods achieve beyond our judgement,'” said the sorrowful girl. “‘What we thought is not confirmed and what we thought not God contives.”

“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.”

“A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy”

“Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.”

“It doesn’t really matter who said it – it’s so obviously true. Bevore you can write anything, you have to notice something.”

“Don’t forget this, too: Rumors aren’t interested in the unsensational story; rumors don’t care what’s true.”

“O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.”

“In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases”

“In this dirty minded world, you are either someone’s wife or someone’s whore. And if you’re not either people think there is something wrong with you….but there is nothing wrong with me”

“You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.”