“You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.”
― John Irving, quote from The Hotel New Hampshire
“It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.”
― John Irving, quote from The Hotel New Hampshire
“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, quote from The Hotel New Hampshire
“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, quote from The Hotel New Hampshire
“Human beings are remarkable - at what we can learn to live with. 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, could we? What else makes us strong?”
― John Irving, quote from The Hotel New Hampshire
“Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can't even remember having met you”
― John Irving, quote from The Hotel New Hampshire
“Safer than we are.” I told Franny. “Safer than love.” “let me tell ya kid,” Franny said to me, squeezing my hand. “Everything’s safer than love.”
― John Irving, quote from The Hotel New Hampshire
“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, quote from The Hotel New Hampshire
“And Father said, “There are no happy endings.” “Right!” cried Iowa Bob – an odd mixture of exuberance and stoicism in his cracked voice. “Death is horrible, final, and frequently premature,” Coach Bob declared. “So what?” my father said. “Right!” cried Iowa Bob. “That’s the point: So what?” Thus the family maxim was that an unhappy ending did not undermine a rich and energetic life. This was based on the belief that there were no happy endings.”
― John Irving, quote from The Hotel New Hampshire
“But I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believe it would be no less complete.”
― John Irving, quote from The Hotel New Hampshire
“Lilly was not crazy. She left a serious suicide note.
'Sorry,' said the note.
'Just not big enough.”
― John Irving, quote from The Hotel New Hampshire
“Don’t you understand?” he would say, “You imagine the story better than I remember it.”
― John Irving, quote from The Hotel New Hampshire
“Sell my old clothes - I'm off to heaven”
― John Irving, quote from The Hotel New Hampshire
“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.”
― John Irving, quote from The Hotel New Hampshire
“Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!”
― John Irving, quote from The Hotel New Hampshire
“What she might have told him was that taxidermy, like sex, is a very personal subject; the manner in which we impose it on others should be discreet.”
― John Irving, quote from The Hotel New Hampshire
“Some producer actually told Franny that profanity revealed a poor vocabulary and a lack of imagination. And Frank and Lilly and Father and I all loved to shout at Franny, then, and ask her what she had said to that. 'What an anal crock of shit, you dumb asshole!' she'd told the producer. 'Up yours - and in your ear, too!”
― John Irving, quote from The Hotel New Hampshire
“But I often think that so-called glamorous people are just very busy people.”
― John Irving, quote from The Hotel New Hampshire
“I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would still be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believe it would be no less complete.”
― John Irving, quote from The Hotel New Hampshire
“A terrorist, I think, is simply another kind of pornographer. The pornographer pretends he is disgusted by his work; the terrorist pretends he is uninterested in the means. The ends, they say, are what they care about. But they are both lying. Ernst loved his pornography; Ernst worshiped the means. It is never the ends that matter -- it is only the means that matter. The terrorist and the pornographer are in it for the means. The means is everything to them. The blast of the bomb, the elephant position, the Schlagobers and blood -- they love it all. Their intellectual detachment is a fraud; their indifference is feigned. They both tell lies about having ‘higher purposes.’ A terrorist is a pornographer.”
― John Irving, quote from The Hotel New Hampshire
“Hang in there, Frank!' Freud called - to the entire lobby. 'Don't let anyone tell you you're queer! You're a prince, Frank!' Freud cried. 'You're better than Rudolf!' Freud yelled to Frank. 'You're more majestic than all the Hapsburgs, Frank!' Freud encouraged him. Frank couldn't speak, he was crying so hard.”
― John Irving, quote from The Hotel New Hampshire
“Of course: because it was in one of the camps that he went blind. They had performed some failed experiment on his eyes in the camp.
‘No, not summer camp,’ Franny had to tell Lilly, who had always been afraid of being sent to summer camp, and was unsurprised to hear that they tortured the campers.”
― John Irving, quote from The Hotel New Hampshire
“Franny’s Hollywood name, her acting name, is one you know. This is our family’s story, and it’s inappropriate for me to use Franny’s stage name – but I know that you know her. Franny is the one you always desire. She is the best one, even when she’s the villain; she always the real hero, even when she dies, even when she dies for love – or worse, for war. She’s the most beautiful, the most unapproachable, but the most vulnerable too, somehow – and the toughest. (She’s why you go to the movie, or why you stay.)”
― John Irving, quote from The Hotel New Hampshire
“...the single ingredient in American literature that distinguishes it from other literatures of the world is a kind of giddy, illogical hopefulness. It is quite technically sophisticated while remaining ideologically naïve.”
― John Irving, quote from The Hotel New Hampshire
“Doris Wales was a woman with straw-blond hair whose body appeared to have been dipped in corn oil; then she must have put her dress on, wet. The dress grabbed at all her parts, and plunged and sagged over the gaps in her body; a lover’s line of hickeys, or love bites – ‘love-sucks,’ Franny called them – dotted Doris’s chest and throat like a violent rash; the welts were like wounds from a whip. She wore plum-covered lipstick, some of which was on her teeth, and she said, to Sabrina Jones and me, ‘You want hot-dancin’ music, or slow-neckin’ music? Or both?’
‘Both,’ said Sabrina Jones, without missing a beat, but I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would still be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believe it would be no less complete.”
― John Irving, quote from The Hotel New Hampshire
“I made some fresh pasta with a neat machine Frank brought from New York; it flattens the dough in sheets and cuts the pasta into any shape you want. It’s important to have toys like that, if you live in Maine.”
― John Irving, quote from The Hotel New Hampshire
“People are like that .... They need to make their own worst experiences universal. It gives them a kind of support.’ And who can blame them? It is just infuriating to argue with someone like that; because of an experience that has denied them their humanity, they go around denying another kind of humanity in others, which is the truth of human variety -- it stands alongside our sameness.”
― John Irving, quote from The Hotel New Hampshire
“I walked all the way through the Heldenplatz – the Plaza of Heroes – and stood where thousands of cheering fascists had greeted Hitler, once. I thought that fanatics would always have an audience; all one might hope to influence was the size of the audience.”
― John Irving, quote from The Hotel New Hampshire
“Jealousy over some big, dumb bear flew out the window as he stared at Ronnie. “You…you were banned from Norway? The country?”
― quote from The Mane Event
“And he knew he would not be travelling home. If he had to wear a donkey jacket and wait for fifty years, then he would wait. At last there was a place in the world where he had reason to be, a place that had meaning. For days, without realising it, he had sensed this meaning everywhere, in the streets, houses, ruins and temples of Rome. It could not be said of the feeling that it was 'filled with pleasurable expectation'. Rome and its millennia were not by nature associated with happiness, and what Mihály anticipated from the future was not what is usually conjured up by 'pleasurable expectation'. He was awaiting his fate, the logical, appropriately Roman, ending.”
― Antal Szerb, quote from Journey by Moonlight
“It doesn't matter how anything happens.”
― Leonard Cohen, quote from The Favorite Game
“Quando uma pessoa leva a vida inteira à espera de uma coisa e depois a encontra, é como se tivesse havido um milagre. Todas as partes de nós ficam à espera, abrem-se e começam a voar. Antes podia-se estar bem, podia ser bom. Tinha-se um objetivo e um rumo e estava tudo bem. Mas depois passa a ser mais do que isso. E a pessoa não consegue explicar o que mudou, mas sabe que, se o perder, nunca mais conseguirá preencher da mesma maneira os espaços que ficaram vazios.”
― Nora Roberts, quote from Key of Light
“Yes, that was part of it.” She linked her fingers, then pulled them apart. “It’s like another brick, Bradley, and I haven’t figured out if it’s like having that brick put down on a walk to give me a good, solid path or like having it mortared into a wall that’s closing me in.” He stared at her, astonished fury pulsing around him. “Who’s trying to close you in? That’s a hell of a thing to put on me, Zoe.” “It’s not you. It’s not about you. It’s about me. What I think, what I feel, what I do. And damn it, I can’t help it if it makes you mad that I have to decide if it’s a wall or a walk.” “A wall or a walk,” he repeated, then took a slug of beer. “Christ, I actually understand that. I’d rather I didn’t.” “It made me feel pushed, and I get mad when I’m pushed. It’s not your fault or your doing, but it doesn’t feel like it’s mine either. I guess I don’t like dealing with what’s not my fault or my doing.” “He was a stupid son of a bitch for letting you go.” She let out a sigh. “He didn’t let me go. He just didn’t hold on to me. And that stopped making me mad a long time ago.” She moved to the stove, took the lid off her pot. “There was something else that happened. I’m going to finish making this meal, and I’ll tell you and the others about it over dinner.” “Zoe.” He touched her shoulder, then opened a cupboard to look for plates. “About those bricks? You can always knock a wall down, and build a nice walk out of it.”
― Nora Roberts, quote from Key of Valor
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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