"If you care about something you have to protect it – If you’re lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it."
— John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany)

"Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!"
— John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany)

"The thing that is most hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most wind up in parentheses."
— John Irving

"When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time -- the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes -- when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever -- there comes another day, and another specifically missing part."
— John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany)

"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 (My Movie Business: A Memoir)

"Keep passing the open windows."
— John Irving

"It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious."
— John Irving (The Hotel New Hampshire)

"The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them."
— John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany)

"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… That’s what happens, like it or not. And because that’s what happens, this is what we need: we need a good, smart bear… Coach Bob knew it all along: you’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed. You have to keep passing the open windows."
— John Irving (The Hotel New Hampshire)

"In this dirty minded world, you are either someone's wife or someone's whore. And if you're not either people think there is something wrong with you....but there is nothing wrong with me"
— John Irving (The World According to Garp)

"In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us -- not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss."
— John Irving (Until I Find You)

"Never confuse faith, or belief – of any kind - with something even remotely intellectual."
— John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany)

"We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them."
— John Irving (Trying to Save Piggy Sneed)

"Imagining something is better than remembering something, Garp wrote."
— John Irving

"…the consequences of sex are often more memorable than the act itself. "
— John Irving (A Widow for One Year)

"The desire to never leave your side, the desire to never see you again. The desire to see your face asleep on the pillow beside my face and to see your eyes open in the morning when I lie next to you—just watching you, waiting for you to wake up."
— John Irving (Until I Find You)

"'If you are careful,' Garp wrote, 'if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day; what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane.'"
— John Irving (The World According to Garp)

"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."
— John Irving (A Widow for One Year)

"In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases"
— John Irving (The World According to Garp)

"… 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 (The Cider House Rules)

"If watching television doesn't hasten death, it surely manages to make death very inviting; for television so shamelessly sentimentalizes and romanticizes death that it makes the living feel they have missed something - just by staying alive."
— John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany)

"Crazy people made him crazy. It was as if he personally resented them giving into madness - in part, because he so frequently labored to behave sanely. When some people gave up the labor of sanity, or failed at it, Garp suspected them of not trying hard enough. "
— John Irving (The World According to Garp)

"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a christian because of Owen Meany. "
— John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany)

"The history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories. "
— John Irving (The World According to Garp)

"All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man."
— John Irving (The World According to Garp)

"…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time."
— John Irving (A Widow for One Year)

"Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England."
— John Irving (The Cider House Rules)

"It is an important distinction to note that she looked not only as if she had taken good care of herself, but that she had good reason to have done so. (...) She looked to be in such total possession of her life that only the most confident men could continue to look at her if she looked back at them. Even in bus stations, she was a woman who was stared at only until she looked back."
— John Irving (The World According to Garp)

"Life is serious but art is fun!"
— John Irving

"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 Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany)

"You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know."
— John Irving (The Hotel New Hampshire)

"It is amazing to me, now, how such wild imaginings and philosophies - inspired by a night charged with frights and calamities - made such perfectly good sense to Owen Meany and me, but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive."
— John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany)

"The more clearly one sees this world; the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist."
— John Irving (A Son of the Circus)

"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)"
— John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany)

"If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?"
— John Irving (My Movie Business: A Memoir)

"This is a writer’s lesson:
To learn that the sounds that we imagine can be the clearest, loudest sounds of all."
— John Irving (Trying to Save Piggy Sneed)

"Logic is relative."
— John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany)

"“Here in St. Cloud’s,” Dr. Larch wrote, “ I have been given the choice of playing God or leaving practically everything up to chance. It is my experience that practically everything is left up to chance much of the time; men who believe in good and evil, and who believe that good should win, should watch for those moments when it is possible to play God – we should seize those moments. There won’t be may”"
— John Irving (The Cider House Rules)

"“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.”"
— John Irving (The Hotel New Hampshire)

"Human beings are remarkable - at what we can learn to live with. If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough, could we? What else makes us strong?"
— John Irving (The Hotel New Hampshire)

"When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark."
— John Irving

"In this dirty minded world, you are either someone's wife or someone's whore."
— John Irving

"“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."
— John Irving (The Cider House Rules)

"“We’re as common as rain.” And she was right: to each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread, we were just a family. In a family, even exaggerations make perfect sense; they are always logical exaggerations, nothing more."
— John Irving

"’I think her heart is broken,’ said Mrs. Grogan miserably.
Dr. Larch pointed out that Melony had taken Jane Eyre with her; he accepted this as a hopeful sign – wherever Melony went, she would not be without guidance, she would not be without love, without faith; she had a good book with her. If only she’ll keep reading it, and reading it, Larch thought.
"
— John Irving (The Cider House Rules)

"She was intimidating to me the way someone who never remembers your name can be intimidating. “In this world,” Franny once observed, “just as you’re trying to think of yourself as memorable, there is always someone who forgets that that they have met you.
"
— John Irving (The Hotel New Hampshire)

"We will often do anything to pretend that nothing is on our minds."
— John Irving (Trying to Save Piggy Sneed)

"He also knew that rivals are best unmanned by being ignored."
— John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany)

"People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers."
— John Irving (The Cider House Rules)

"'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 (The World According to Garp)