Charlotte > Charlotte's Quotes

“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

“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

“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

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

“The desire to never leave your side, the desire to never see you again. The desire to see your face asleep on the pillow beside my face and to see your eyes open in the morning when I lie next to you—just watching you, waiting for you to wake up.”
― John Irving, Until I Find You

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

“I want to go on being a student," I told him. "I want to be a teacher. I'm just a reader," I said.

"DON'T SOUND SO ASHAMED," he said. "READING IS A GIFT."

"I learned it from you," I told him.

"IT DOESN'T MATTER WHERE YOU LEARNED IT- IT'S A GIFT. 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

“All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.”
― John Irving, The World According to Garp

“Half my life is an act of revision.”
― John Irving

“We are formed by what we desire”
― John Irving, In One Person

“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.”
― John Irving, In One Person

“All I say is: Let us leave les folles alone; let's just leave them be. Don't judge them. You are not superior to them - don't put them down.”
― John Irving, In One Person

“Novels are just another kind of cross-dressing, aren't they?”
― John Irving, In One Person

“By '95 - in New York, alone - more Americans had died of AIDS than were killed in Vietnam.”
― John Irving, In One Person

“The time to read Madame Bovary is when your romantic hopes and desires have crashed, and you will believe that your future relationships will have disappointing - even devastating - consequences.”
― John Irving, In One Person

“My dear boy, " Miss Frost said sharply. "My dear boy, please don't put a label on me - don't make a category before you get to know me!”
― John Irving, In One Person

“...where our desires "come from"; that is a dark, winding road.”
― John Irving, In One Person

“Never trust a man with a lunatic wife in an attic," Richard told me. "And anyone named Heathcliff should make you suspicious.”
― John Irving, In One Person

“I'm just a woman with a penis!" she would say, her voice rising.”
― John Irving, In One Person

“...there's a limit to enduring admiration being a substitute for love.”
― John Irving, In One Person

“In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases”
― John Irving, The World According to Garp

“Crazy people made him crazy. It was as if he personally resented them giving into madness - in part, because he so frequently labored to behave sanely. When some people gave up the labor of sanity, or failed at it, Garp suspected them of not trying hard enough. ”
― John Irving, The World According to Garp

“In this dirty-minded world you are either somebody's wife or somebody's whore, or fast on your way to becoming one or the other.”
― John Irving, The World According to Garp

“All human wisdom is contained in these two words - Wait and Hope”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“If nothing saves us from death, at least love should save us from life”
― Pablo Neruda

“let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.”
― Sylvia Plath

“And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure . . . And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, 'Yes, the stars always make me laugh!' And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you...”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.”
― Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler

“We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, 'Blessed are they that mourn,' and I accept it. I've got nothing that I hadn't bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed