top of page
"No one but me ever put a hand on me to feel that baby. No one wanted to put his ear against it and listen...You shouldn't have a baby if there's no one who wants to feel it kick or listen to it move."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Parenting quotes

"The unjustifiable severity of a parent is loaded with this aggravation, that those whom he injures are always in his sight."

"Kids are a great analogy. You want your kids to grow up, and you don't want your kids to grow up. You want your kids to become independent of you, but it's also a parent's worst nightmare: That they won't need you. It's like the real tragedy of parenting."

"I learned to love my son without wanting to possess him and I learned how to teach him to teach himself."

"Sometimes your kids will say the nastiest things, won't they, Rose? You want to ask,'Whose child is this?'"Rose chuckled."But usually, they're just in some kind of pain. They need to work it out."

"I don't think my parents liked me. They put a live teddy bear in my crib."

"Never tell a child that something it's too hard."
Explore more quotes by John Irving

"Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is."

"You don't want to dwell on your enemies, you know. I basically feel so superior to my critics for the simple reason that they haven't done what I do. Most book reviewers haven't written 11 novels. Many of them haven't written one."

"A person's faith goes at its own pace. The trouble with church is the service. A service is conducted for a mass audience. Just when I start to like the hymn, everyone plops down to pray. Just when I start to hear the prayer, everyone pops up to sing. And what does the stupid sermon have to do with God? Who knows what God thinks of current events? Who cares?"

"(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it, it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action."

"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."

"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."

"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?"
bottom of page