J > J's Quotes

“Keep passing the open windows.”
― John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

“Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin

“I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ”
― Anais Nin

“In this dirty minded world, you are either someone's wife or someone's whore. And if you're not either people think there is something wrong with you....but there is nothing wrong with me”
― John Irving, The World According to Garp

“We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more.”
― Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

“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—and summons them to your recall with will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“Logic is relative.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

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

“What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.”
― John Irving, The Cider House Rules

“Never confuse faith, or belief—of any kind—with something even remotely intellectual.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.”
― John Irving, The Cider House Rules

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

“The more clearly one sees this world; the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.”
― John Irving, A Son of the Circus

“Hope is something really tough and tenacious you have to give up. It’s an addiction to break.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Damned

“Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.”
― John Irving

“When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”
― Roald Dahl, The Twits

“If you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”
― Roald Dahl

“Do you know what breakfast cereal is made of? It's made of all those little curly wooden shavings you find in pencil sharpeners!”
― Roald Dahl

“But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“A single metaphor can give birth to love.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d”
― Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard

“There was an awful suspicion in my mind that I'd finally gone over the hump, and the worst thing about it was that I didn't feel tragic at all, but only weary, and sort of comfortably detached.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary

“It may be the wrong decision, but fuck it, it's mine.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Katherine Kenton remains among the generation of women who feel that the most sincere form of flattery is the male erection.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Tell-All