Amy > Amy's Quotes

“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

“Keep passing the open windows.”
― 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

“Some producer actually told Franny that profanity revealed a poor vocabulary and a lack of imagination. And Frank and Lilly and Father and I all loved to shout at Franny, then, and ask her what she had said to that. 'What an anal crock of shit, you dumb asshole!' she'd told the producer. 'Up yours - and in your ear, too!”
― John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

“Franny’s Hollywood name, her acting name, is one you know. This is our family’s story, and it’s inappropriate for me to use Franny’s stage name – but I know that you know her. Franny is the one you always desire. She is the best one, even when she’s the villain; she always the real hero, even when she dies, even when she dies for love – or worse, for war. She’s the most beautiful, the most unapproachable, but the most vulnerable too, somehow – and the toughest. (She’s why you go to the movie, or why you stay.)”
― John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

“Those are my principles, and if you don't like them...well I have others.”
― Groucho Marx

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

“If there is a true measure of a person's soul, if there is a single gauge of real divinity, of how beautifully a fellow human honors this life, has genuine spiritual fire and is full of honest love and compassion, it has to be right there, in the eyes.

The Dalai Lama's eyes sparkle and dance with laughter and unbridled love. The Pope's eyes are dark and glazed, bleak as obsidian marbles. Pat Robertson's eyes are rheumy and hollow, like tiny potholes of old wax. Goldman Sachs cretins, well, they don't use their own eyes at all; they just steal someone else's.”
― Mark Morford

“When Benedict dies, he will have the pleasure of standing before whatever furious God he believes in, to answer for how it was that he knew for undeniable fact that one -- if not dozens -- of his priests repeatedly molested, abused and/or raped young children for decades, and he did nothing to stop it. How much does God believe the pope's argument that Vatican PR trumps pedophilia? Joe Ratzinger, 82, will soon find out.”
― Mark Morford

“The murdering of one's own humanity for the sake of power and position has been around since man first oozed out of the slime and demanded a campaign contribution.”
― Mark Morford

“It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.”
― John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

“My life is a reading list.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“Life is serious but art is fun!”
― John Irving

“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

“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

“What do Americans know about morality? They don't want their presidents to have penises but they don't mind if their presidents covertly arrange to support the Nicaraguan rebel forces after Congress has restricted such aid; they don't want their presidents to deceive their wives but they don't mind if their presidents deceive Congress- lie to the people and violate the people's constitution!”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“Every American should be forced to live outside the United States for a year or two. Americans should be forced to see how ridiculous they appear to the rest of the world! They should listen to someone else's version of themselves--to anyone else's version! Every country knows more about America than Americans know about themselves! And Americans know absolutely nothing about any other country!”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilization, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”
― Cicero

“Curious that we spend more time congratulating people who have succeeded than encouraging people who have not.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

“My view is that if your philosophy is not unsettled daily then you are blind to all the universe has to offer.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

“After all, what nobler thought can one cherish than that the universe lives within us all?”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

“I would request that my body in death be buried not cremated, so that the energy content contained within it gets returned to the earth, so that flora and fauna can dine upon it, just as I have dined upon flora and fauna during my lifetime”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

“Our nation is turning into an idiocracy.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier

“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

“You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.”
― John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

“You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked ‘female’.”
― Erin McKean

“Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam. A country without a language is a country without a soul.”
― Pádraig Pearse

“The wise have pitied the fool that hath striven to give a life
In the world of time and space among the bulks of actual things,
To dream that was dreamed in the heart, and that only the heart could hold.
Oh wise men, riddle me this: What if the dream come true?”
― Pádraig Pearse