Skip to content

Your memory is a monster; you forget — it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!

— John Irving A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989)

Another quote →

More quotes by John Irving

You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.

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

A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989)

Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.

Until I Find You (2005)

He wrote Helen that "a part of adolescence is feeling that there's no one else around you who's enough like yourself to understand you."

The World According to Garp (1978)

You can't learn everything you need to know legally.

A Widow for One Year (1998)

All John Irving quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John Irving (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.