In One Person: A Novel

by John Irving

“Slow down, William. Savor, don’t gorge. And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it—perhaps your favorite sentence—to memory. That way you won’t forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.”

All children learn to speak in codes.

“The time to read Madame Bovary is when your romantic hopes and desires have crashed, and you believe that your future relationships will have disappointing—even devastating—consequences.”

neither childhood nor future grows any smaller.’

“ ‘Every angel is terrifying.’

“people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.”

“Small towns may revile you, but they have to keep you—they can’t turn you away.

Rumors aren’t interested in the unsensational story; rumors don’t care what’s true.

“Once you start repeating what people say to you, it’s a hard habit to break.”

“Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.”

“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. Your memory summons things to your recall with a will of its own. You imagine you have a memory, but your memory has you!”

‘Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy.’

“We’re writers. We make things up.”

“The same old themes, but better done—the pleas for tolerance never grow tiresome, Bill. Of course, everyone is intolerant of something or someone.

“it seemed quite inconceivable that this calm life of hers could really be the happiness of which she used to dream.”)

the problem with living in New York for any length of time is that many New Yorkers can’t imagine that there’s anywhere else they could live.

you live your life at the time you live it—you don’t have much of an overview when what’s happening to you is still happening.

What can you say in a frigging alumni magazine about a transsexual wrestler who was killed in a bar fight? Not much.

(Fucking bullies; most of them are cowards.)

“My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me—don’t make me a category before you get to know me!” Miss Frost had said to me; I’ve never forgotten it.