“…the consequences of sex are often more memorable than the act itself.”
― John Irving, quote from A Widow for One Year
“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, quote from A Widow for One Year
“…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.”
― John Irving, quote from A Widow for One Year
“It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound.”
― John Irving, quote from A Widow for One Year
“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, quote from A Widow for One Year
“You can't learn everything you need to know legally.”
― John Irving, quote from A Widow for One Year
“…there is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old…”
― John Irving, quote from A Widow for One Year
“. . .There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments . . .”
― John Irving, quote from A Widow for One Year
“Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.”
― John Irving, quote from A Widow for One Year
“I try to see the whole woman,' Eddie said to Hannah. 'Of course I recognize that she's old, but there are photographs - or the equivalent of photographs in one's imagination of anyone's life. A whole life, I mean. I can picture her when she was much younger than I am - because there are always gestures and expressions that are ingrained, ageless. An old woman doesn't see herself as an old woman, and neither do I. I try to see her her whole life in her. There's something so moving about someone's whole life.”
― John Irving, quote from A Widow for One Year
“The gardener had a dread of small women; he'd always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.”
― John Irving, quote from A Widow for One Year
“But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.”
― John Irving, quote from A Widow for One Year
“An affection that was calculated was never trustworthy.”
― John Irving, quote from A Widow for One Year
“She was convinced that women were as often victims of themselves as they were of men.”
― John Irving, quote from A Widow for One Year
“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, quote from A Widow for One Year
“That’s what I love about boys,” Marion told him. “No matter what, you just go about your business.”
― John Irving, quote from A Widow for One Year
“…there was no better company for an especially personal revelation than the company of virtual strangers.”
― John Irving, quote from A Widow for One Year
“Only the chicken-lover will understand me. He will give me a kindly look, maybe mildly desirous. His eyes will tell me: You might look a lot better with some reddish-brown feathers.”
― John Irving, quote from A Widow for One Year
“It galls me that seeking out the seedy, the sordid, the sexual, and the deviant is the expected (if not altogether acceptable) behavior of male writers; it would surely benefit me, as a writer, if I had the courage to seek out more of the seedy, the sordid, the sexual, and the deviant myself. But women who seek out such things are made to feel ashamed, or else they sound stridently ridiculous in defending themselves -- as if they're bragging. ... Yet there are subjects that remain off-limits for women writers. It's not unlike that dichotomy which exists regarding one's sexual past: it is permissible, even attractive, for a man to have had one, but if a woman has had a sexual past, she'd better keep quiet about it.”
― John Irving, quote from A Widow for One Year
“Most men don't mind if another woman watches. It's the women who are watching who don't want to be seen.”
― John Irving, quote from A Widow for One Year
“Ruth thought of a novel as a great, untidy house, a disorderly mansion; her job was to make the place fit to live in, to give it at least the semblance of order. Only when she wrote was she unafraid.”
― John Irving, quote from A Widow for One Year
“Of course, if I write a first-person novel about a woman writer, I am inviting every book reviewer to apply the autobiographical label -- to conclude that I am writing about myself. But one must never not write a certain kind of novel out of fear of what the reaction to it will be.”
― John Irving, quote from A Widow for One Year
“It was from just a few sentences that a writer learned anything from another writer.”
― John Irving, quote from A Widow for One Year
“... the surprised bookseller, whose name (inexplicably) was Mendelssohn. He was no relation to the German composer, and this Mendelssohn either overliked his last name or disliked his first so much that he never revealed it. (When Ted had once asked him his first name, Mendelssohn had said only: "Not Felix.")”
― John Irving, quote from A Widow for One Year
“She asserted that the best fictional detail was a chosen detail, not a remembered one - for fictional truth was not only the truth of observation, which was the truth of mere journalism. The best fictional detail was the detail that should have defined the character or the episode or the atmosphere. Fictional truth was what should have happened in a story - not necessarily what did happen or what had happened.”
― John Irving, quote from A Widow for One Year
“There are few things as seemingly untouched by the real world as a child asleep.”
― John Irving, quote from A Widow for One Year
“And maybe it was fair; if a book was any good, it was a slap in the face to someone.”
― John Irving, quote from A Widow for One Year
“A novel is always more complicated than it seems at the beginning. Indeed a novel should be more complicated than it seems at the beginning.”
― John Irving, quote from A Widow for One Year
“If you're a writer, the problem is that, when you try to call a halt to thinking about your novel-in-progress, your imagination still keeps going; you can't shut it off.”
― John Irving, quote from A Widow for One Year
John Irving
Born place: in Exeter, New Hampshire, The United States
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“Absolute certainty is the greatest of all illusions.”
― Jayne Ann Krentz, quote from Absolutely, Positively
“Babies need not to be taught a trade, but to be introduced to a world. To put the matter shortly, woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time when he asks all the questions that there are, and some that there aren't. It would be odd if she retained any of the narrowness of a specialist. Now if anyone says that this duty of general enlightenment (even when freed from modern rules and hours, and exercised more spontaneously by a more protected person) is in itself too exacting and oppressive, I can understand the view. I can only answer that our race has thought it worth while to cast this burden on women in order to keep common-sense in the world. But when people begin to talk about this domestic duty as not merely difficult but trivial and dreary, I simply give up the question. For I cannot with the utmost energy of imagination conceive what they mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small import to the soul, then as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean. To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets, cakes. and books, to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.”
― G.K. Chesterton, quote from What's Wrong with the World
“O why doe wretched men so much desire,
To draw their dayes vnto the vtmost date,
And doe not rather wish them soone expire,
Knowing the miserie of their estate,
And thousand perills which them still awate,
Tossing them like a boate amid the mayne,
That euery houre they knocke at deathes gate?
And he that happie seemes and least in payne,
Yet is as nigh his end, as he that most doth playne.”
― Edmund Spenser, quote from The Faerie Queene
“They held the funeral on the second day, with the town coming to look at Miss Emily beneath a mass of bought flowers with the crayon face of her father musing profoundly above the bier and the ladies sibilant and macabre; and the very old men - some in their brushed Confederate uniforms - on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.”
― William Faulkner, quote from A Rose for Emily and Other Stories
“I don’t understand,” said the scientist, “why you lemmings all rush down to the sea and drown yourselves.” “How curious,” said the lemming. “The one thing I don’t understand is why you human beings don’t.”
― James Thurber, quote from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
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