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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 6260632 | 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 | ||
| dd04218 | We all go through a phase--it lasts a lifetime, for some of us--when we're embarrassed by our parents; we don't want them hanging around us because we're afraid they'll do or say something that will make us feel ashamed of them. | John Irving | ||
| c0eff22 | The chain of events, the links in our lives--what leads us where we're going, the courses we follow to our ends, what we don't see coming, and what we do--all this can be mysterious, or simply unseen, or even obvious. | John Irving | ||
| 3f604f4 | Y naturalmente, para ser justos, lo mejor de las ellenjamesianas habia consistido en dar a conocer el pavor general que tan brutalmente amenazaba a mujeres y ninas. Para muchas ellenjamesianas, la imitacion del horrible deslenguamiento no habia sido "enteramente politico". Habia sido una identificacion muy personal. Por supuesto, en algunos casos las ellenjamesianas eran mujeres que tambien habian sido violadas y lo que querian decir era qu.. | John Irving | ||
| c6df01f | Sometimes, when we are labeled, when we are branded, our brand becomes our calling; | John Irving | ||
| a9907ab | At first it had slashed up the little silk pockets of her purse. Then she found part of an old thermometer container that slipped over the head of the scalpel, capping it like a fountain pen. It was this cap she removed when the soldier moved into the seat beside her and stretched his arm along the armrest they were (absurdly) meant to share. | John Irving | ||
| 2507a7e | THAT IS WHERE THIS COUNTRY IS HEADED--IT IS HEADED TOWARD OVERSIMPLIFICATION. YOU WANT TO SEE A PRESIDENT OF THE FUTURE? TURN ON ANY TELEVISION ON ANY SUNDAY MORNING--FIND ONE OF THOSE HOLY ROLLERS: THAT'S HIM, THAT'S THE NEW MISTER PRESIDENT! AND DO YOU WANT TO SEE THE FUTURE OF ALL THOSE KIDS WHO ARE GOING TO FALL IN THE CRACKS OF THIS GREAT, BIG, SLOPPY SOCIETY OF OURS? I JUST MET HIM; HE'S A TALL, SKINNY, FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY NAMED 'DIC.. | John Irving | ||
| 355622b | For a terrible time of life a teen-ager deceives himself; he believes he can trick the world. He believes he is invulnerable. An adolescent who is an orphan at this phase is in danger of never growing up. | orphan teenage deception vulnerable | John Irving | |
| 0a4af8c | patriotism is not necessarily defined as blind devotion to a president's particular agenda--and that to dispute a presidential policy is not necessarily anti-American. | John Irving | ||
| c6b00c6 | No matter what my fucking last words were, please say they were these: 'I have always known that the pursuit of excellence is a lethal habit. | humor last-words | John Irving | |
| b3cda6a | 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. | rape humanity victimhood experience | John Irving | |
| c5ac709 | The Life of Riley in its best-known version evolved from a prospective Groucho Marx vehicle called The Flotsam Family. The Marx series failed at audition when the would-be sponsor wouldn't accept Groucho in what was, for him, a straight role--as head of a family. Then producer Irving Brecher saw a film, The McGuerins of Brooklyn, with a rugged-looking and typically American blue-collar man, William Bendix, in one of the leading roles. There.. | John Dunning | ||
| 348a4af | TODAY'S THE DAY! '... HE THAT BELIEVETH IN ME, THOUGH HE WERE DEAD, YET SHALL HE LIVE; AND WHOSOEVER LIVETH AND BELIEVETH IN ME SHALL NEVER DIE. | John Irving | ||
| 8b392f6 | We tend to think that if you don't know where you're goin, you don't belong where you are. | john irving | ||
| 9bd26cb | In schools--even in good schools, like Exeter--they tend to teach the shorter books by the great authors; at least they begin with those. Thus it was Billy Budd, Sailor that introduced me to Melville, which led me to the library, where I discovered Moby Dick on my own. | John Irving | ||
| 07aa770 | I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice--not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany. I make no claims to have a life in Christ, or with Christ--and certainly not for Christ, which I've heard some zealots claim. I'm not very sophisticated in my knowledge.. | John Irving | ||
| 2f482c7 | to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal,'" Pastor Merrill said. "'So we are always of good courage'!" my father exhorted us. "'We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight,'" he said. "'We are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So whether we are at hom.. | John Irving | ||
| ba2b29b | 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. "For example, I would like to ask .. | John Irving | ||
| c96bc5d | Garp didn't want a daughter because of men. Because of bad men, certainly; but even, he thought, because of men like me. | John Irving | ||
| 8db97eb | Things often are as they appear. First impressions matter. | John Irving | ||
| ec3879b | Before about 1900, there is little discernible trace in American cultural conversations of the phrase 'American dream' being used to describe a collective, generalisable national ideal of any kind, let alone an economic one. The phrase does not appear in any of the foundational documents in American history-it's nowhere in the complete writings of Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton or James Madison. It's not in Hector St. John Crevecoeur .. | Sarah Churchwell | ||
| 12ba460 | 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 | ||
| 45322ea | I read the passage Owen had underlined most fervently in his copy of St. Thomas Aquinas--" Demonstration of God's Existence from Motion." I read the passage over and over, sitting on Owen Meany's bed. Since everything that is moved functions as a sort of instrument of the first mover, if there was no first mover, then whatever things are in motion would be simply instruments. Of course, if an infinite series of movers and things moved were .. | John Irving | ||
| 9239c43 | It was Owen Meany who taught me that any good book is always in motion--from the general to the specific, from the particular to the whole, and back again. Good reading--and good writing about reading--moves the same way. | John Irving | ||
| 64fa587 | 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 | ||
| 07ae355 | We all know the elementary form of politeness, that of the empty symbolic gesture, a gesture-an offer-which is meant to be rejected. In John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany, after the little boy Owen accidentally kills John's-his best friend's, the narrator's-mother, he is, of course, terribly upset, so, to show how sorry he is, he discreetly delivers to John a gift of the complete collection of color photos of baseball stars, his most pre.. | Slavoj Žižek | ||
| 557e85c | Unless you were high up in a building or happened to glimpse it at the end of one of the big avenues going east-west, all you knew of the sunset was a darkening in the air. No wonder people in New York were so unbalanced. They were totally untouched by the rhythms of nature. You were only aware of nature when something extreme happened, like a snowstorm or heatwave. | Susan Minot | ||
| ff10cfe | So many things in this world were cracked and sad, and still a glowing showed through and moments came when everything was lit and love happened. Every tree stood where it belonged, each bird had perfect feathers folded against its tiny body, each holding a heart beating madly. Life was a vibration of light and dark, and love illuminated that life. Then darkness descended and your heart was ripped apart. So that was part of it, a requiremen.. | Susan Minot | ||
| 510f724 | When a person you love moves by you with flat eyes that will not see you, it is a shock to believe it. | Susan Minot | ||
| 54633e8 | Tinhas ar de quem nao precisava de ninguem, disse ela. Mas sao esses os que mais precisam, retorquiu ele. Entao nao sabes disso? Agora ja sei, disse ela. Tarde de mais. O saber nunca vem tarde de mais!, exclamou ele. Talvez nao, respondeu ela. Mas pode vir tarde de mais para nos servir para alguma coisa. | Susan Minot | ||
| bf22424 | Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do. | Vikram Chandra | ||
| 412e6fe | People had stances, they threw out opinions, they made ferocious noises, but decisions were often made in a flurry of competing silences, and what was not said mattered more than what was. | Vikram Chandra | ||
| ff8b146 | 'There is no completeness; nothing endures, nothing lives; there is only change, unreasoning unreasonable; only birth and death repeating the same story each time, yet different; why?' The voice laughed--'Why you know already; look in your hands. | Vikram Chandra | ||
| bfc906c | human beings were stupid, they circled round and around and finally came back to where they started, as if pulled back by the steady tug of an inescapable cord. But | Vikram Chandra | ||
| 194ba53 | The reactions of others were actually another lesson she'd learned about change. When change happened to an individual, it happened to everyone around her - sometimes in ways she wished for, though sometimes in ways she wished against. | Rachel Simon | ||
| f31a9af | I realize, as the tightness yields in my shoulders and hips and feet, that Beth might well have wanted me to meet her drivers because I needed them, too." p 167" | Rachel Simon | ||
| 542fa22 | Martha giggled; the baby was holding her. Astounding. A person comes into the world with a fist--and a grasp, she thought. Yes, we are built to fight one another, but also to embrace. How cleverly we are created. | Rachel Simon | ||
| e395b2c | Martha sat back. She felt her chest heaving, and in the silence that followed, she looked into Julia's eyes and saw, past the challenging stance, the self-loathing, the effects of the wine, Lynnie. And Martha knew, as she hadn't until now, why she couldn't tell Julia the whole story. It wasn't only because Martha wanted to restrain herself from teaching Julia a harsh lesson or because she wanted Julia to be grateful for her sacrifices. It w.. | Rachel Simon | ||
| 23113ec | There were two kinds of hope: the kind you couldn't do anything about and the kind you could. And even if the kind you could do something about wasn't what you'd originally wanted, it was still worth doing. A rainy day is better than no day. A small happiness can make a big sadness less sad. | Rachel Simon | ||
| 8a561e4 | And she'd felt an opening in her chest where she hadn't known anything was closed. | Rachel Simon | ||
| 315b142 | Looking back in time was very exciting to me. But looking forward is more challenging--nothing unfolds as you anticipate, and it's the small things, not the huge geologic shifts, that make or break you. | Rachel Simon | ||
| 3afcbf8 | We should torture language to tell the truth. | torture | Rachel Kushner | |
| 157c27d | Looking at someone who is looking at you was a drug as strong as any other. | Rachel Kushner | ||
| 67b760c | It was good to be a stranger in Los Angeles. It was bad to be a stranger in Los Angeles with the company of another stranger in a loud shirt. | Rachel Kushner |