Zak > Zak'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

“Imagining something is better than remembering something.”
― 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

“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

“It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don't expect me to change.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“It´s natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you have to let everything happen to them. You can't interfere with people you love any more than you're supposed to interfere with people you don't even know. And that's hard, ..., because you often feel like interfering -you want to be the one who makes the plans.”
― John Irving, The Cider House Rules

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

“People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.”
― John Irving, The Cider House Rules

“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

“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

“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

“They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.”
― John Irving, The World According to Garp

“when however small a measure of jealousy is mixed with misunderstanding, there is always going to be trouble.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“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

“These same people who tell us we must defend the lives of the unborn-they are the same people who seem not so interested in defending anyone but themselves after the accident of birth is complete! These same people who profess their love of the unborn's soul-they don't care to make much of a contribution to the poor, they don't care to offer much assistance to the unwanted or the oppressed! How do they justify such a concern for the fetus and such a lack of concern for unwanted and abused children? They condemn others for the accident of conception; they condemn the poor-as if the poor can help being poor. One way the poor could help themselves would be to be in control of the size of their families. I thought that freedom of choice was obviously democratic-was obviously American!”
― John Irving, The Cider House Rules

“wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.”
― John Irving

“Here is the trap you are in.... And it's not my trap—I haven't trapped you. Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you—because you know how to perform them—have no choice, either. What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too. If abortion was legal, a woman would have a choice—and so would you. You could feel free not to do it because someone else would. But the way it is, you're trapped. Women are trapped. Women are victims, and so are you.”
― John Irving, The Cider House Rules

“…there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.”
― John Irving, The Cider House Rules

“If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough.”
― John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

“Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don’t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind – making it up as you go along, like a common liar.”
― John Irving

“Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.”
― John Irving, Last Night in Twisted River

“The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child.”
― John Irving

“Being reviewed is being condescended to by your inferiors.”
― John Irving

“Thus we try to keep our heroes alive; hence we remember them.”
― John Irving, Last Night in Twisted River

“It's natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you can't interfere with people you love anymore than you're supposed to interfere with people you don't even know.”
― John Irving, The Cider House Rules

“Is it a democratic society that condemns people to the accident of conception? What are we-monkeys? If you expect people to be responsible for their children, you have to give them the right to choose whether or not to have children. What are you people thinking of? You're not only crazy! You're ogres!”
― John Irving, The Cider House Rules

“Just because you're sober, don't think you're a good driver, Cookie.”
― John Irving, Last Night in Twisted River

“But I often think that so-called glamorous people are just very busy people.”
― John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

“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

“In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?”
― John Irving, The World According to Garp