The Last Chairlift Quotes

“You are never over your childhood, not until you are under the train—unter dem Zug.”
― John Irving, The Last Chairlift

“Loved ones leave us and we go on—ghosts or no ghosts, my way or Molly’s, we still see them. As Matthew and I knew, the dead don’t entirely go away—not if you see them on the subway, or in your heart.”
― John Irving, The Last Chairlift

“Okay,” I said. There are these moments when you see the course of your life unfolding, and you feel powerless to alter it.”
― John Irving, The Last Chairlift

“As Em would one day act out for me, pantomimists are always misquoted.”
― John Irving, The Last Chairlift

“Readers vary, when it comes to having the imagination to enjoy a story outside their own experiences.”
― John Irving, The Last Chairlift

“You don’t choose your nightmares; they choose you.”
― John Irving, The Last Chairlift

“Adam, we can’t make being safe the guiding principle of our lives. We have to be who we are—we can only do what we do, sweetie.”
― John Irving, The Last Chairlift

“Lies of omission count as lies, sweetie—they can be the worst ones.”
― John Irving, The Last Chairlift

“They resembled an elderly, long-married couple—devoted to each other without conversation.”
― John Irving, The Last Chairlift

“When you write about your life as a screenplay, it’s as if you’re watching someone else’s life; it’s not your life, and you’re not living it. You’re only seeing what the characters do, your character included. And screenplays are written in the present tense—as if nothing has already happened, as if everything is unfolding in the present. I’m only saying this is how it started—how I began to see my life as an unmade movie. The way it began was almost natural. INT.”
― John Irving, The Last Chairlift

“This gets complicated, because I know that not all ghosts are dead. In certain cases, you can be a ghost and still be half-alive—only a significant part of you has died. I wonder how many of these half-alive ghosts are aware of what has died in them, and—dead or alive—if there are rules for ghosts.”
― John Irving, The Last Chairlift

“The snowshoer had written about Reagan—just one sentence, after seeing her friends who were dying of AIDS. “If or when there’s another plague, I hope America has a better plague president than Ronald Reagan,” the little English teacher wrote.”
― John Irving, The Last Chairlift

“When the lies of omission unravel, so does the story.”
― John Irving, The Last Chairlift

“This is the way confessing works—once you start, you can’t stop.”
― John Irving, The Last Chairlift

“When you write screenplays that don’t get made, you lose your sense of humor about the bad movies that do get made”
― John Irving, The Last Chairlift

“There’s a reason we’re fiction writers, you know—real life sucks; make-believe is our business,” I try to tell her.”
― John Irving, The Last Chairlift

“As Nora had also said, “Nothing will change.” She meant the Catholic Church and the Republicans, but—according to Em—the Republicans would get worse.”
― John Irving, The Last Chairlift

“It sounds the same to me, Kid,” Molly said. “The new lift takes you to the same old place. It’s the same trip, just a faster ride—it’s no more or less depressing than it ever was,” she added.”
― John Irving, The Last Chairlift

“Even I knew better than to sleep with a ghost. And it was the wrong time for a moral dilemma.”
― John Irving, The Last Chairlift

“I’d been a writer long enough to sense when someone has the soul of a reader—like a poor cowboy, who’s not had much opportunity to read.”
― John Irving, The Last Chairlift

“Some readers and writers don’t look like readers or writers.”
― John Irving, The Last Chairlift

“It’s hard to pretend to be born without causing offense.”
― John Irving, The Last Chairlift

“Nana never remembered where you stopped reading, and wherever you started Moby-Dick, Mildred Brewster knew exactly where she was in the story. What my grandmother didn’t know was where she was in her own story.”
― John Irving, The Last Chairlift

“Greene’s writing—he was the first modern writer I liked. Before Greene, my heroes were all novelists from the nineteenth century. Living in the nineteenth century can expand your loneliness; as a writer, it’s lonely living there.”
― John Irving, The Last Chairlift

“I just don’t dare to make up everything, like you do.” I don’t make up everything, but when I use things that actually happened, I always change something; I try to make what happens not exactly true.”
― John Irving, The Last Chairlift

“If women are Republicans, they’ve been brainwashed—the men have brainwashed them,” Nana said.”
― John Irving, The Last Chairlift

“But you don’t see with hindsight in a first draft. You have to finish the first draft to see what you’ve missed.”
― John Irving, The Last Chairlift

“What my grandmother meant was that supper was ready to eat. Only the cooking of it was finished. As usual, it was an overcooked casserole of unidentifiable ingredients; it was mortally finished, a casserole cooked into submission. Also finished was what remained of my aunts’ patience with my uncles’ lack of clarity concerning their wartime memories.”
― John Irving, The Last Chairlift

“Reading good novels can make almost anything seem imaginable”
― John Irving, The Last Chairlift

“Reading good novels can make young readers seem more experienced about relationships than they are.”
― John Irving, The Last Chairlift