Quote

You're nice,' Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. 'And you're my oldest friend.' But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Life
Hand
Nice
Friends
Known
Squeezing
Hands
Oldest
Someone
Friend
Must
Told
Never
Quite

More quotes by John Irving

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You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.
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And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.
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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.
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I think that was when the headmaster realized he had lost he realized then that he was finished. Because, what could he do? Was he going to tell us to stop praying? We kept our heads bowed and we kept praying. Even as awkward as he was, the Rev. Mr. Merrill had made it clear to us that there was no end to praying for Owen Meany.
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You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed.
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All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.
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If I had to be anything, he told her, I'd probably be a socialist, but I don't want to be anything.
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So, you see, it's a real chore for me to write a book review because it's like a contest. It's like I'm writing that book review for every bad book reviewer I've ever known and it's a way of saying [thrusts a middle finger into the air] this is how you ought to do it. I like to rub their noses in it.
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They all settled into being the kind of friends when they heard from each other.... or when they occasionally got together. And when they were not in touch, they did not think of one another.
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Imagining something is better than remembering something.
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We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.
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Is it a democratic society that condemns people to the accident of conception? What are we-monkeys? If you expect people to be responsible for their children, you have to give them the right to choose whether or not to have children. What are you people thinking of? You're not only crazy! You're ogres!
John Irving
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A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy
John Irving
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The excitement of anticipation was *almost* equal to the thrill of lovemaking.
John Irving
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He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
John Irving
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…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.
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Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
John Irving
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but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
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There's nothing as scary as the future.
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Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!
John Irving