The gardener had a dread of small women; he’d always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.
JOHN IRVINGThe powerful wind swept his hair away from his face; he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he’d not yet seen.
More John Irving Quotes
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Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean – make sure they know what they mean!
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Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.
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Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else’s religion practiced on us.
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… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.
JOHN IRVING -
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.
JOHN IRVING -
The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it’s not work for me.
JOHN IRVING -
It doesn’t really matter who said it – it’s so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.
JOHN IRVING -
There are always suicides among people who are unable to say what they mean.
JOHN IRVING -
Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.
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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 -
When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother’s hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
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The main character and the most important character are not always the same person – you have to know the difference.
JOHN IRVING -
It’s a no-win argument – that business of what we’re born with and what our environment does to us. And it’s a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.
JOHN IRVING -
It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
JOHN IRVING -
You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
JOHN IRVING