John Irving Quotes
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.
Quotes to Explore
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I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active - not more happy - nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.
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The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral - whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love? I want to foster eulogy virtues when I'm in a yoga class or meditation session or any spiritual gathering. Especially if I'm lying in corpse pose. It just makes sense.
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When the depths are upheld by the Holy Spirit, then the reaction is Christian.
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There are minds so impatient of inferiority that their gratitude is a species of revenge, and they return benefits, not because recompense is a pleasure, but because obligation is a pain.
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My failures have been errors in judgment, not of intent.
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I would like to do a duet with Taylor Hanson, because I have loved Hanson since I was 8.
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Yesterday morning I amused myself with an exercise of a talent I once possessed, but have so neglected that my performance might almost be called an experiment. I cut out a dress for one of the women.
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Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
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When we show up in a city, we ask, 'Where's the best restaurant? What's the best beer?' You start doing that, and you get exposed to a lot of great stuff.
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Unending was the stream, unending the misery, unending the sorrow.
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Cultivation of mind should be the ultimate aim of human existence.
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I don't talk about political matters. That's not my department.
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I always think that I love doing what I'm doing at the moment. The past is over. I can't go play one of those characters again. But I can play this and I can continue to grow in what I'm doing at the moment and that's really what I'm thinking about now.
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We talking about revolution because that's the era that you're caught in.
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You do a show to be a hit and hopefully run a couple of years.
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Secularist justices de-Christianized our country. They invented new rights for vicious criminals as though criminal justice were a game. They tore our country apart with idiotic busing orders to achieve racial balance in public schools.
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Useful as a war against France, undertaken by the Government against the will of the people would be for our revolutionary development, just so dangerous must be the effect upon our democratic development of a war supported by blind popular enthusiasm.
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Some girls are just born with glitter in their veins.
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Hope is the most exciting thing in life, and if you honestly believe that love is out there, it will come. And even if it doesn't come straight away, there is still that chance all through your life that it will.
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Was it really this easy, once you escaped, to just not care?
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Never index your own book.
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In Turkey, we have lived almost everything that could be lived; war and torture... The war concept was consumed to its limits. But there is only one way we have not tried: negotiations, peace, and talking.
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Money-getters are the benefactors of our race. To them ... are we indebted for our institutions of learning, and of art, our academies, colleges and churches.
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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.
