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 IRVINGYou only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
More John Irving Quotes
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I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
JOHN IRVING -
No one but me ever put a hand on me to feel that baby. No one wanted to put his ear against it and listen…You shouldn’t have a baby if there’s no one who wants to feel it kick or listen to it move.
JOHN IRVING -
A part of adolescence is feelimg that there’s no one else around who’s enough like youself to understand you.
JOHN IRVING -
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.
JOHN IRVING -
When you legislate personal belief, you’re in violation of freedom of religion.
JOHN IRVING -
I’ve always been slow but I’m even slower now. I’m more into the waiting, or I guess I’m more patient about the waiting.
JOHN IRVING -
Kids are beautiful, man. And they know much more than grownups think they know. Kids are just perfect people until grownups get their hands on them.
JOHN IRVING -
You’re nice,’ Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. ‘And you’re my oldest friend.’ But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends.
JOHN IRVING -
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 life
JOHN IRVING -
So, I don’t work in terms of real time. I don’t work in a timely fashion.
JOHN IRVING -
It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don’t expect me to change.
JOHN IRVING -
In an episodic treatment, such as a teleplay is, you have the ability to do what you can do in a novel, which is flash back and flash forward in the same instant, in the same scene, in the same voice.
JOHN IRVING -
He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.
JOHN IRVING -
He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
JOHN IRVING -
Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
JOHN IRVING