A Widow for One Year Quotes

“…the consequences of sex are often more memorable than the act itself.”
― John Irving, A Widow for One Year

“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

“…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.”
― John Irving, A Widow for One Year

“What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life - to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?”
― John Irving, A Widow for One Year

“It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound.”
― John Irving, A Widow for One Year

“You can't learn everything you need to know legally.”
― John Irving, A Widow for One Year

“…there is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old…”
― John Irving, A Widow for One Year

“. . .There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments . . .”
― John Irving, A Widow for One Year

“Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.”
― John Irving, A Widow for One Year

“But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.”
― John Irving, A Widow for One Year

“I try to see the whole woman,' Eddie said to Hannah. 'Of course I recognize that she's old, but there are photographs - or the equivalent of photographs in one's imagination of anyone's life. A whole life, I mean. I can picture her when she was much younger than I am - because there are always gestures and expressions that are ingrained, ageless. An old woman doesn't see herself as an old woman, and neither do I. I try to see her her whole life in her. There's something so moving about someone's whole life.”
― John Irving, A Widow for One Year

“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 was convinced that women were as often victims of themselves as they were of men.”
― John Irving, A Widow for One Year

“An affection that was calculated was never trustworthy.”
― John Irving, A Widow for One Year

“People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both; yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.”
― John Irving, A Widow for One Year

“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

“Because who can describe the look that triggers the memory of loved ones? Who can anticipate the frown, the smile, or the misplaced lock of hair that sends a swift, undeniable signal from the past? Who can ever estimate the power of association, which is always strongest in moments of love and in memories of death?”
― John Irving, A Widow for One Year

“…there was no better company for an especially personal revelation than the company of virtual strangers.”
― John Irving, A Widow for One Year

“There are few things as seemingly untouched by the real world as a child asleep.”
― John Irving, A Widow for One Year

“Only the chicken-lover will understand me. He will give me a kindly look, maybe mildly desirous. His eyes will tell me: You might look a lot better with some reddish-brown feathers.”
― John Irving, A Widow for One Year

“Most men don't mind if another woman watches. It's the women who are watching who don't want to be seen.”
― John Irving, A Widow for One Year

“Of course, if I write a first-person novel about a woman writer, I am inviting every book reviewer to apply the autobiographical label -- to conclude that I am writing about myself. But one must never not write a certain kind of novel out of fear of what the reaction to it will be.”
― John Irving, A Widow for One Year

“Ruth thought of a novel as a great, untidy house, a disorderly mansion; her job was to make the place fit to live in, to give it at least the semblance of order. Only when she wrote was she unafraid.”
― John Irving, A Widow for One Year

“She asserted that the best fictional detail was a chosen detail, not a remembered one - for fictional truth was not only the truth of observation, which was the truth of mere journalism. The best fictional detail was the detail that should have defined the character or the episode or the atmosphere. Fictional truth was what should have happened in a story - not necessarily what did happen or what had happened.”
― John Irving, A Widow for One Year

“It galls me that seeking out the seedy, the sordid, the sexual, and the deviant is the expected (if not altogether acceptable) behavior of male writers; it would surely benefit me, as a writer, if I had the courage to seek out more of the seedy, the sordid, the sexual, and the deviant myself. But women who seek out such things are made to feel ashamed, or else they sound stridently ridiculous in defending themselves -- as if they're bragging. ... Yet there are subjects that remain off-limits for women writers. It's not unlike that dichotomy which exists regarding one's sexual past: it is permissible, even attractive, for a man to have had one, but if a woman has had a sexual past, she'd better keep quiet about it.”
― John Irving, A Widow for One Year

“... the surprised bookseller, whose name (inexplicably) was Mendelssohn. He was no relation to the German composer, and this Mendelssohn either overliked his last name or disliked his first so much that he never revealed it. (When Ted had once asked him his first name, Mendelssohn had said only: "Not Felix.")”
― John Irving, A Widow for One Year

“It was from just a few sentences that a writer learned anything from another writer.”
― John Irving, A Widow for One Year

“In Ruth's view, they looked 'like a couple' because they seemed to possess some terrible secret between them - they appeared stricken with remorse when they saw her. Only a novelist could ever imagine such nonsense. (In part, it was because of her perverse ability to imagine anything that in this instance Ruth failed to imagine the obvious)”
― John Irving, A Widow for One Year

“If you're a writer, the problem is that, when you try to call a halt to thinking about your novel-in-progress, your imagination still keeps going; you can't shut it off.”
― John Irving, A Widow for One Year

“A novel is always more complicated than it seems at the beginning. Indeed a novel should be more complicated than it seems at the beginning.”
― John Irving, A Widow for One Year