Because who can describe that look that triggers the memory of loved ones? Who can anticipate the frown, the smile, or the misplaced lock of hair that sends a swift, undeniable signal from the past? Who can ever estimate the power of association, which is always strongest in moments of love and in memories of death?

John Irving

Categorized in : Past Memories Hair

If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.

John Irving

courage love-you life

Keep passing the open windows.

John Irving

encouraging depression life

You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.

John Irving

growth grows ends

It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.

John Irving

hard-work serious art

We don't always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly--as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth--the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives

John Irving

sky people fall

If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.

John Irving

finished process ifs

. . .There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments . . .

John Irving

moments enough doe

If you don't feel that you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then probably what you are doing isn't very vital.

John Irving

losing-control humiliating feels

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

grief loss death

Being afraid you'll look like a coward is the worst reason for doing anything.

John Irving

coward appearance looks

And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.

John Irving

tears memories book

Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents' own rule.

John Irving

moments parent children

In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases

John Irving

owen-meany cases world

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

falling-in-love love-is fall

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

moments feelings people

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

cooking writing giving

Never confuse faith, or belief — of any kind — with something even remotely intellectual.

John Irving

kind intellectual belief

Anyone can be sentimental about the nativity; any fool can feel like a Christian at Christmas. But Easter is the main event; if you don’t believe in the resurrection, you’re not a believer." “If you don’t believe in Easter,” Owen Meany said. “Don’t kid yourself—Don’t call yourself a Christian.

John Irving

easter christian believe

In our hearts... there must abide some pity for those people who have always felt themselves to be separate from even their most familiar surroundings, those people who either are foreigners or who suffer a singular point of view that makes them feel as if they’re foreigners - even in their native lands. In our hearts... there also abides a certain suspicion that such people need to feel set apart from their society. But people who initiate loneliness are no less lonely than those who are suddenly surprised by loneliness, nor are they undeserving of our pity.

John Irving

lonely loneliness heart

I thought some of the stories were neat; I liked some of the liturgy and some of the songs. If you're a writer you have some inclination to pay attention. I didn't just tune it out and think about baseball. So, it had an effect on me.

John Irving

baseball song thinking