I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes – toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings.
JOHN IRVINGRituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.
More John Irving Quotes
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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.
JOHN IRVING -
There’s no reason you shouldn’t, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.
JOHN IRVING -
It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.
JOHN IRVING -
Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
JOHN IRVING -
I have no respect for the right-to-life position, though I have every respect for an individual who says, “I could never have that procedure, I could never see a film or read a book about that procedure.” It doesn’t bother me if people feel that way.
JOHN IRVING -
A sentence boiled in her, but she could not yet see it clearly.
JOHN IRVING -
No one could have fathomed what a life he’d led, for it was chiefly a life lived in his mind.
JOHN IRVING -
Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
JOHN IRVING -
You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
JOHN IRVING -
If pride is a sin … moral pride is the greatest sin.
JOHN IRVING -
Patriotism is not necessarily defined as blind devotion to a president’s particular agenda – and that to dispute a presidential policy is not necessarily anti-American.
JOHN IRVING -
All I say is: Let us leave les folles alone; let’s just leave them be. Don’t judge them. You are not superior to them – don’t put them down.
JOHN IRVING -
Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
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 -
How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.
JOHN IRVING