Treading water, a little dog-paddling – it’s a lot like writing a novel, Clark,” the dump reader told his former student. “It feels like you’re going a long way, because it’s a lot of work, but you’re basically covering old ground – you’re hanging out in familiar territory.

— John Irving

John Irving Quotes

But she drew the line at television. It took no effort to watch – it was infinitely more beneficial to the soul, and to the intelligence, to read or to listen – and what she imagined there was to watch on TV appalled her; she had, of course, only read about it.

— John Irving

It was as if all the books in her room had been feeding on her, had consumed – not nourished – her.

— John Irving

There is at least one terrible thing about lovers – real lovers, I mean: people who are in love with each other, even then they will relish their every physical contact in a sexual way; even when they’re supposed to be in a kind of mourning, they can get aroused. Franny and I simply couldn’t have gone on holding each other on the stairs: it was impossible to touch each other, at all, and not want to touch everything.

— John Irving

Love also floats. And, that being true, love probably resembles Sorrow in other ways.

— John Irving

Wizened and white, with brown blotched on her face the size and complexity of unshelled peanuts, Midge had a jitter in her head that made her pew like a chicken trying to make up its mind what to peck.

— John Irving

Importantly, it was in this out north to Steering, with the real Ellen James sleep and in his care, that T. S. Garp decided he would try to be more like his mother, Jenny Fields. A thought, it occurred to him, that would have pleased his mother greatly if it had only come to him when she was alive.

— John Irving

God creates us out of love, but we don’t want God, or we don’t believe in Him, or we pay very poor attention to Him. Nevertheless, God continues to love us – at least, He continues to try to get our attention. Pastor Merrill made religion seem reasonable. And the trick of having faith, he said, was that it was necessary to believe in God without any great or even remotely reassuring evidence that we don’t inhabit a godless universe.

— John Irving

Aren’t eccentricities fairly common among overachievers.

— John Irving

From that moment on, he would never stop seeing her, not in his minds eye – not whenever he closed his eyes and tried to sleep. She would always be there.

— John Irving

But Vienna was in its death phase; it lay still and let me look at it, and think about it, and look again. In a living city, I could never have noticed so much. Living cities don’t hold still.

— John Irving

It was in looking at sea gulls that it first occurred to Homer Wells that he was free.

— John Irving

She felt if she ever had children she would love them no less when they were twenty than when they were two; they might need you more at twenty, she thought. What do you really need when you’re two? In the hospital, the babies were the easiest patients. The older they got, the more they needed; and the less anyone wanted or loved them.

— John Irving

Americans are suckers for an English accent.

— John Irving

There is often a defining experience that marks any significant change in the course of a person’s life.

— John Irving

A loving couple will say things to each other – you know, Danny – just to make each other feel good about a situation, even if the situation isn’t good, or it they shouldn’t feel good about i,” Ketchum said. “A loving couple will make up their own rules, as if these made-up rules were as reliable or counted for as much as the rules everyone else tried to live by – if you know what I mean.

— John Irving

But not even a drunk can sleep through Boellmann’s Toccata – not even outside the church, apparently. Alice enjoyed acting out how the drunken down-and-out had presented himself.

— John Irving

It seemed to Alice that the drunk should have been struck dead for using such language in a church, but before God could take any action against the down-and-out, William resumed playing – with a vengeance.

— John Irving

I was four, and I sincerely believe that this is my first memory of life itself – as opposed to what I was told happened, as opposed to the pictures other people have painted for me.

— John Irving

Do not forget the past; forgive the past.

— John Irving

He was an obstetrician; he delivered babies into the world. His colleagues called this ‘the Lord’s work.’ And he was an abortionist; he delivered mothers, too. His colleagues called this ‘the Devil’s work,’ but it was all the Lord’s work to Wilbur Larch. As Mrs. Maxwell had observed: ‘The true physician’s soul cannot be too broad and gentle.

— John Irving
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