Gracjan > Gracjan's Quotes

“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

“You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.”
― John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

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

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

“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

“Every American should be forced to live outside the United States for a year or two. Americans should be forced to see how ridiculous they appear to the rest of the world! They should listen to someone else's version of themselves--to anyone else's version! Every country knows more about America than Americans know about themselves! And Americans know absolutely nothing about any other country!”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“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

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

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

“You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.”
― John Irving, The World According to Garp

“Logic is relative.”
― 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

“You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I'm going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life”
― John Irving, The World According to Garp

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

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

“Sorrow floats.”
― John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”
― Noam Chomsky