John Irving
This was not of the nature of a Christlike lesson for Owen Meany to learn, as he lay in the manger, that someone you hate can give you a hard-on.Collection: Hate
Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.Collection: People
Because who can describe that look that triggers the memory of loved ones? Who can anticipate the frown, the smile, or the misplaced lock of hair that sends a swift, undeniable signal from the past? Who can ever estimate the power of association, which is always strongest in moments of love and in memories of death?Collection: Memories
The characters in my novels, from the very first one, are always on some quixotic effort of attempting to control something that is uncontrollable - some element of the world that is essentially random and out of control.Collection: Character
I have lots of notebooks around, because one great advantage of writing by hand-in addition to how much it slows you down-is that it makes me write at the speed that I feel I should be composing, rather than faster than I can think, which is what happens to me on any keyboard.Collection: Notebook
I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I've seen in the country since John Kennedy.Collection: Country
...every study of the gods, of everyone's gods, is a revelation of vengeance towards the innocent.Collection: Study
Being afraid you'll look like a coward is the worst reason for doing anything.Collection: Coward
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.Collection: Memories
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.Collection: People
If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves.Collection: Long
But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.Collection: Falling In Love
Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents' own rule.Collection: Children
We invent what we love and what we fear.Collection: Fear
In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal casesCollection: World
You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I'm going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a lifeCollection: Father
Safer than we are.” I told Franny. “Safer than love.” “let me tell ya kid,” Franny said to me, squeezing my hand. “Everything’s safer than love.Collection: Kids
…there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.Collection: Safety
It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don't expect me to change.Collection: Responsibility
wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.Collection: Reading
It's magical thinking to imagine that the reason unspeakable things are being perpetrated by younger and younger people is that they've fallen under the influence of seductive, lascivious, prurient, and violent material in books, films, television. A great deal of this type of censorship has to do with absolving parents of responsibility - parents who just plop their kids in front of the television and leave them there hour upon hour.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Love
Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.Collection: Dies
I thought some of the stories were neat; I liked some of the liturgy and some of the songs. If you're a writer you have some inclination to pay attention. I didn't just tune it out and think about baseball. So, it had an effect on me.Collection: Baseball
If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?Collection: Mankind
We will often do anything to pretend that nothing is on our minds.Collection: Mind
Being reviewed is being condescended to by your inferiors.Collection: Inferiors
Anyone can be sentimental about the nativity; any fool can feel like a Christian at Christmas. But Easter is the main event; if you don’t believe in the resurrection, you’re not a believer." “If you don’t believe in Easter,” Owen Meany said. “Don’t kid yourself—Don’t call yourself a Christian.Collection: Christian
The gardener had a dread of small women; he'd always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.Collection: Size
Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.Collection: Beer
Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.Collection: Matter
There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.Collection: Years
So we dream on. Thus we invent our lives. We give ourselves a sainted mother, we make our father a hero; and someone’s older brother and someone’s older sister – they become our heroes too. We invent what we love and what we fear. There is always a brave lost brother – and a little lost sister, too. We dream on and on: the best hotel, the perfect family, the resort life. And our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them.Collection: Mother
Lilly was not crazy. She left a serious suicide note. 'Sorry,' said the note. 'Just not big enough.Collection: Suicide
The former stewardess glared at her ex-pilot husband as if he had been speaking, and thinking, in the absence of sufficient oxygen.Collection: Husband
You live your life at the time you live it -- you don't have much of an overview when what's happening to you is still happening.Collection: Live Your Life
Owen Meany believed that “coincidence” was a stupid, shallow refuge sought by stupid, shallow people who were unable to accept the fact that their lives were shaped by a terrifying and awesome design – more powerful and unstoppable than the Yankee Flyer. (a train)Collection: Powerful
Grant us safe lodging, and holy rest,” Mrs. Grogan was saying, “and peace at last.” Amen, thought Wilbur Larch, the Saint of St. Cloud’s, who was seventy-something, and an ether addict, and who felt that he’d come a long way and still had a long way to go.Collection: Clouds
It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.Collection: Teenager
Being wrong about important things is exhausting.Collection: Important
Don’t you understand?” he would say, “You imagine the story better than I remember it.Collection: Stories
He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lessonCollection: Lessons
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.Collection: Memories
O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.Collection: Giving
I'm not a movie person. They're collaborations of the worst kind. You must compromise yourself to many interests that are venal and crass and do not have your best interests at heart.Collection: Heart
You cannot drive with your eyes in the rear-view mirror… But dignity is difficult to maintain. Stamina requires constant upkeep. Repetition is boring. And you pay for grace.Collection: Eye
Owen meany who rarely wasted words and who had the conversation-stopping habit of dropping remarks like coins into a deep pool of water... remarks that sank, like truth, to the bottom of the pool where they would remain untouchable.Collection: Water
I think now that is the nature of hymns-they make us want to repeat them...they are a part of any service, and often the only part of a funeral service, that makes us feel everything is acceptable.Collection: Thinking
You don't have to be in the habit of going to church to listen to such a literary minister; you don't have to be a believer to be moved by Mr. Buechner's faith.Collection: Church