Top 380 John Irving Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

302. “When people die, Vargas – I mean the people you will always remember, the ones who changed your life – they never really go away,” Pepe told the young doctor.”

— John Irving

303. “Homer and Candy passed by the empty and brightly lit dispensary; they peeked into Nurse Angela’s empty office. Homer knew better than to peek into the delivery room when the light was on. From the dormitory, they could hear Dr. Larch’s reading voice. Although Candy held tightly to his hand, Homer was inclined to hurry – in order not to miss the bedtime story.”

— John Irving

304. “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

305. “As often as I feel certain that God exists, I feel as often at a loss to say what difference it makes – that He exists – or even: that to believe in God, which I do, raises more questions than it presents answers. Thus, when I am feeling my most faithful, I also feel full of a few hard questions that I would like to put to God – I mean, critical questions of the How-Can-He, How-Could-He, How-Dare-You variety.”

— John Irving

306. “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!”

— John Irving

307. “It had been a startling day for young Copperfield: most of the morning confined in an enema-bag carton; his first attempt at flight; his long fall through the weeds; and then sitting on that dead man’s face.”

— John Irving

308. “Importantly, it was in this out north to Steering, with the real Ellen James sleep and in his care, that T. S. Garp decided he would try to be more like his mother, Jenny Fields. A thought, it occurred to him, that would have pleased his mother greatly if it had only come to him when she was alive.”

— John Irving

309. “It was best not to ask Pepe if reading or Jesus had saved him, or which one had saved him more.”

— John Irving

310. “God creates us out of love, but we don’t want God, or we don’t believe in Him, or we pay very poor attention to Him. Nevertheless, God continues to love us – at least, He continues to try to get our attention. Pastor Merrill made religion seem reasonable. And the trick of having faith, he said, was that it was necessary to believe in God without any great or even remotely reassuring evidence that we don’t inhabit a godless universe.”

— John Irving

311. “Once again, Jack reached for her hand. It was the only thing he knew how to do. As it would turn out, it was about the only thing he reall knew.”

— John Irving

312. “And what were the rules at St. Cloud’s? What were Larch’s rules? Which rules did Dr. Larch observe, which ones did he break, or replace – and with what confidence?”

— John Irving

313. “Lupe began to recite a list of reasons. “One: love of dogs,” she started. “Two: to be stars – in a circus, we might be famous. Three: because the parrot man will come visit us, and our future – ” She stopped for a second. “His future, anyway,” Lupe said, pointing to her brother. “His future is in the parrot man’s hands – I just know it is, circus or no circus.”

— John Irving

314. “Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can’t even remember having met you.”

— John Irving

315. “Women know when men don’t desire them: ghosts and witches, deities and demons, angels of death – even virgins, even ordinary women. They always know; women can tell when you have stopped desiring them.”

— John Irving

316. “Sure, I know them. You can’t exactly get lost in Winnipeg.”

— John Irving

317. “He was an obstetrician; he delivered babies into the world. His colleagues called this ‘the Lord’s work.’ And he was an abortionist; he delivered mothers, too. His colleagues called this ‘the Devil’s work,’ but it was all the Lord’s work to Wilbur Larch. As Mrs. Maxwell had observed: ‘The true physician’s soul cannot be too broad and gentle.”

— John Irving

318. “We were in a phase, through television and the movies, of living only vicariously. Even faintly sordid silliness excited us if it put us in contact with love.”

— John Irving

319. “The only reason for something to happen in a novel is that it’s the perfect thing to have happen at that time.”

— John Irving

320. “Many of Juan Diego’s demons had been his childhood companions-he knew them so well, they were as familiar as friends.”

— John Irving

321. “An aura of fate had marked him. He moved slowly; he often appeared to be lost in thought, or in his imagination – as if his future were predetermined, and he wasn’t resisting it.”

— John Irving

322. “They were members of Maine’s very small money class. Their business, as they ridiculously called it, didn’t make a cent, but they didn’t need to make money; they were born rich. Their needless enterprise consisted of taking people to the wilderness and creating for them the sensation that they were lost there; they also took people shooting down rapids in frail rafts or canoes, creating for them the sensation that they would surely be bashed to death before they drowned.”

— John Irving

323. “This was not of the nature of a Christlike lesson for Owen Meany to learn, as he lay in the manger, that someone you hate can give you a hard-on.”

— John Irving

324. “A man named Hero washed the press cloths; Meany Hyde told Homer that the man had been a kind of hero, once. ‘That’s all I heard. He’s been comin’ here for years, but he was a hero. Just once,’ Meany added, as if there might be more shame attached to the rarity of the man’s heroism than there was glory to be sung for his moment in the sun.”

— John Irving

325. “But this is what we do: we dream on, and our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them. That’s what happens, like it or not.”

— John Irving

326. “I wanted my cousins to like Owen, because I liked him – he was my best friend – but, at the same time, I didn’t want everything to be so enjoyable that I’d have to invite Owen to Sawyer Depot the next time I went. I was sure that would be disastrous. And I was nervous that my cousins would make fun of Owen; and I confess I was nervous that Owen would embarrass me – I am ashamed of feeling that, to this day.”

— John Irving

327. “She felt if she ever had children she would love them no less when they were twenty than when they were two; they might need you more at twenty, she thought. What do you really need when you’re two? In the hospital, the babies were the easiest patients. The older they got, the more they needed; and the less anyone wanted or loved them.”

— John Irving

328. “When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.”

— John Irving

329. “Homer Wells, listening to Big Dot Taft, felt like her voice – dulled. Wally was away, Candy was away, and the anatomy of a rabbit was, after Clara, no challenge; the migrants, whom he’d so eagerly anticipated, were just plain hard workers; life was just a job. He had grown up without noticing when? Was there nothing remarkable in the transition?”

— John Irving

330. “Lupe’s language is just a little different,” Juan Diego was saying. “I can understand it.”

— John Irving

331. “What do Americans know about morality? They don’t want their presidents to have penises but they don’t mind if their presidents covertly arrange to support the Nicaraguan rebel forces after Congress has restricted such aid; they don’t want their presidents to deceive their wives but they don’t mind if their presidents deceive Congress- lie to the people and violate the people’s constitution!”

— John Irving

332. “Wizened and white, with brown blotched on her face the size and complexity of unshelled peanuts, Midge had a jitter in her head that made her pew like a chicken trying to make up its mind what to peck.”

— John Irving

333. “Listen to me, Bill,” Richard said. “Let the librarian be your new best friend. If you like what she’s given you to read, trust her. The library, the theater, a passion for novels and plays – well, Bill, this could be the door to your future. At your age, I lived in a library! Now novels and plays are my life.”

— John Irving

334. “Grief is contagious,” Marion began again. “I didn’t want you to catch my grief, Eddie. I really didn’t want Ruth to catch it.”

— John Irving

335. “It seems to me that people who don’t learn as easily as others suffer from a kind of learning disability – there is something different about the way they comprehend unfamiliar material – but I fail to see how this disability is improved by psychiatric consultation. What seems to be lacking is a technical ability that those of us called ‘good students’ are born with. Someone should concretely study these skills and teach them. What does a shrink have to do with the process?”

— John Irving

336. “It won’t take much of a city to be a city for me.”

— John Irving

337. “Garp was a natural storyteller; he could make things up, one right after the other, and they seemed to fit. But what did they mean?”

— John Irving

338. “Do not forget the past; forgive the past.”

— John Irving

339. “Like any good novel, it lulled him into an almost tranquil state of awareness before it jolted him – it caught him completely by surprise.”

— John Irving

340. “And so this added consideration – that she never get pregnant – contributed to the moderation of their coupling, which was almost always managed under conditions harsh enough to win the approval of New England’s founding fathers.”

— John Irving

341. “Because I was a Wheelwright-and, therefore, a New England snob-I’d assumed that Phoenix was largely composed of Mormons and Baptists and Republicans;.”

— John Irving

342. “We can afford the workers’ compensation, Harry – he’ll watch what he says the time next, won’t he?” Nils would say. “The ‘next time,’ Nils,” Grandpa Harry would gently correct his old friend.”

— John Irving

343. “And from that moment of his introduction to my cousins, I would frequently consider the issue of exactly how human Owen Meany was; there is no doubt that, in the dazzling configurations of the sun that poured through the attic skylight, he looked like a descending angel – a tiny but fiery god, sent to adjudicate the errors of our ways.”

— John Irving

344. “Wherever Melony went, she would not be without guidance, she would not be without love, without faith; she had a good book with her. If only she kept reading it and reading it...”

— John Irving

345. “Jack realized that when you’re happy – especially when it’s the first time in your life – you think of things that would never have occurred to you when you were unhappy.”

— John Irving

346. “What did you do that for?” the customs guy asked him. “We haven’t been getting along lately,” Jack admitted. “Well, this’ll really help,” the guy said.”

— John Irving

347. “Don’t grown-ups ever get over things?”

— John Irving

348. “As a fourteen-year-old, he’d not been old enough to have sympathy for her – for either the child or the adult that she was.”

— John Irving

349. “You are never over your childhood, not until you are under the train – unter dem Zug.”

— John Irving

350. “I was four, and I sincerely believe that this is my first memory of life itself – as opposed to what I was told happened, as opposed to the pictures other people have painted for me.”

— John Irving