Shelia > Shelia'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

“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

“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

“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

“Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else's religion practiced on us.”
― John Irving, My Movie Business: A Memoir

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

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

“The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us -- not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.”
― John Irving, Until I Find You

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

“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

“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 often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.”
― John Irving, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

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

“If you are careful,' Garp wrote, 'if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day; what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane.”
― John Irving, The World According to Garp

“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

“Imagining something is better than remembering something.”
― John Irving, The World According to Garp

“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

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

“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

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

“… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.”
― John Irving, The Cider House Rules

“If watching television doesn't hasten death, it surely manages to make death very inviting; for television so shamelessly sentimentalizes and romanticizes death that it makes the living feel they have missed something - just by staying alive.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“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

“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

“The history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories. ”
― John Irving, The World According to Garp

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

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

“You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.”
― John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

“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