"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

"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)

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

"“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)

"“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)

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

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

"When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark."
— 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 (A Prayer for Owen Meany)

"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)

"What she might have told him was that taxidermy, like sex, is a very personal subject; the manner in which we impose it on others should be discreet."
— John Irving (The Hotel New Hampshire)

"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)

"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)

"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)

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

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

"Almost none of them understood Great Expectations or David Copperfield, anyway. They were not only too young for the Dickensian language, they were also too young to comprehend the usual language of St. Cloud’s. What mattered to Dr. Larch was the idea of reading aloud – it was a successful soporific for the children who didn’t know what they were listening to, and for those few who understood the words and the story, then the evening reading provided them with a way to leave St. Cloud’s in their dreams, in their imaginations.
Dickens was a personal favorite of Dr. Larch; it was no accident, of course, that both Great Expectations and David Copperfield were concerned with orphans. (‘What in the hell else would you read to an orphan?’ Dr. Larch inquired in his journal.)
"
— John Irving (The Cider House Rules)

"...wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading."
— The World According to Garp, John Irving

"The gardener had a dread of small women; he'd always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size."
— John Irving (A Widow for One Year)

"She felt detached from her family, and thought it strange how they had lavished so much attention on her, as a child, and then at some appointed, prearranged time they seemed to stop the flow of affection and being the expectations - as if, for a brief phrase, you were expected to absorb love (and get enough), and then, for a much longer and more serious phase, you were expected to fulfill certain obligations."
— John Irving (The World According to Garp)

"You cannot drive with your eyes in the rear-view mirror… But dignity is difficult to maintain. Stamina requires constant upkeep. Repetition is boring. And you pay for grace."
— John Irving (Trying to Save Piggy Sneed)

"As it was, things went from bad to worse, as they often will when amateurs are involved in an activity that they perform in bad temper – or in a hurry."
— John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany)

"I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous."
— John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany)

"“Don’t you understand?” he would say, “You imagine the story better than I remember it.”"
— John Irving (The Hotel New Hampshire)

"But I often think that so-called glamorous people are just very busy people."
— John Irving (The Hotel New Hampshire)

"“That’s what I love about boys,” Marion told him. “No matter what, you just go about your business.”"
— John Irving (A Widow for One Year)

"The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be."
— Douglas Adams

"A learning experience is one of those things that says, "You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.""
— Douglas Adams (The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time)

"The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't."
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"What to do if you find yourself stuck with no hope of rescue: Consider yourself lucky that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far, which given your present circumstances seems more likely, consider yourself lucky that it won't be troubling you much longer."
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it."
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays."
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
— Douglas Adams (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be."
— Douglas Adams

"Humans think they are smarter than dolphins because we build cars and buildings and start wars etc...and all that dolphins do is swim in the water, eat fish and play around. Dolphins believe that they are smarter for exactly the same reasons."
— Douglas Adams

"Because your heart is so beautiful, everything looks beautiful to you."
— Japanese proverb

"Remember your first best friend."
— PROMISES Message

"L'amour est aveugle; l'amitié ferme les yeux. Love is blind; friendship closes its eyes."
— anon.

"Are not lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it."
— C.S. Lewis

"We have so much time and so little to do. Strike that, reverse it."
— Roald Dahl

"Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For those two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people."
— Roald Dahl

"Mr. Twit was a twit. He was born a twit. And, now at the age of sixty, he was a bigger twit than ever."
— Roald Dahl (The Twits)

"Do you like vegetables?" Sophie asked, hoping to steer the conversation towards a slightly less dangerous kind of food.
"You is trying to change the subject," the Giant said sternly. "We is having an interesting babblement about the taste of the human bean. The human bean is not a vegetable."
— Roald Dahl (The BFG)

"A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it"
— Roald Dahl

"I'd rather be fried alive and eaten by Mexicans."
— Roald Dahl (James and the Giant Peach)

"I was already beginning to realize that the only way to conduct oneself in a situation where bombs rained down and bullets whizzed past, was to accept the dangers and all the consequences as calmly as possible. Fretting and sweating about it all was not going to help."
— Roald Dahl (Going Solo)

"You should never, never doubt something that no one is sure of. "
— Roald Dahl (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory)

"I cannot for the life of me understand why small children take so long to grow up. I think they do it deliberately, just to annoy me.
"
— Agatha Trunchbull ( Roald Dahl's Matilda)

"I am only 8 years old, I told myself. No little boy of 8 has ever murdered anyone. It's not possible."
— Roald Dahl