Frases de John Irving

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“¡Hijo de la chingada!”

“Detiene la camioneta para decirme que Marion es "una mujer difícil"' se decía. Incluso a un muchacho de su edad esa manifestación le parecía insincera, mejor dicho, falsa por completo. Era una expresión estrictamente masculina, lo que los hombres que se creían corteses decían de sus ex esposas. Era lo que decía un hombre de una mujer inalcanzable para él, o que de alguna manera se había hecho inaccesible. Era lo que un hombre decía de una mujer cuando quería decir otra cosa, cualquier otra cosa.”

“De alguna manera -había argumentado Garp- la vida es demasiado. La vida es un folletín melodramático no apto para menores, John”

“En este mundo de cochina mentalidad”, piensa Jenny, “eres la esposa de alguien o la puta de alguien; o vas camino de convertirte en una de las dos cosas. Si no encajas en ninguna de las dos categorías, todo el mundo trata de hacerte creer que algo te pasa.”

“Hago lo que quiero - afirmó Garp -. No le pongas otro nombre. Sólo hago lo que me da la gana… y eso es precisamente lo que hizo mi madre toda su vida, o sea lo que quería hacer.”

“Ruth sabía que era afortunada. Se dijo que su próxima novela debería tratar de la buena suerte, de cómo la buena suerte y el infortunio se distribuyen de una manera desigual, si no al nacer, por lo menos a medida que se dan las circunstancias sobre las que no tenemos control alguno, así como los acontecimientos que entran en colisión: la gente que conocemos, el momento en que ese conocimiento tiene lugar y si esas personas importantes podrían conocer casualmente a otras, y el momento en que podría suceder tal cosa.”

“Y naturalmente, para ser justos, lo mejor de las ellenjamesianas había consistido en dar a conocer el pavor general que tan brutalmente amenazaba a mujeres y niñas. Para muchas ellenjamesianas, la imitación del horrible deslenguamiento no había sido "enteramente político". Había sido una identificación muy personal. Por supuesto, en algunos casos las ellenjamesianas eran mujeres que también habían sido violadas y lo que querían decir era que se sentían como si les faltara la lengua. En un mundo de hombres, sentían que las habían reducido al silencio para siempre.”

“Escribió que la peor razón para que algo ocurriera en una novela era que hubiera ocurrido realmente. “¡Todo ha ocurrido realmente, alguna vez!”, rabiaba. “La única razón para que algo ocurra es que es perfecto que ocurra en ese momento”.
-Dime cualquier cosa que te haya ocurrido a ti- dijo en cierta ocasión a una entrevistadora- y yo lo mejoraré. Puedo mostrar los detalles mejor que como ocurrieron.”

“¿No estoy aquí, que soy tu madre?”

“¡Pinche pendejo chimuelo!”

“If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough.”

“If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves.”

“Owen meany who rarely wasted words and who had the conversation-stopping habit of dropping remarks like coins into a deep pool of water… remarks that sank, like truth, to the bottom of the pool where they would remain untouchable.”

“A woman half dressed seemed to have some power, but a man was simply not as handsome as when he was naked, and not as secure as when he was clothed.”

“Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.”

“The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child.”

“Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.”

“And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.”

“Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.”

“This is a writer’s lesson:
To learn that the sounds that we imagine can be the clearest, loudest sounds of all.”

“This was not of the nature of a Christlike lesson for Owen Meany to learn, as he lay in the manger, that someone you hate can give you a hard-on.”

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

“Being wrong about important things is exhausting.”

“…there is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old…”

“As it was, things went from bad to worse, as they often will when amateurs are involved in an activity that they perform in bad temper – or in a hurry.”

“It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.”

“…there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.”

“I think about you more and more, but I don't waste my time - or yours - thinking about who you were before I knew you.”

“Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.”

“(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it; it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action”

“Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer's irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.”

“If pride is a sin… moral pride is the greatest sin.”

“You cannot drive with your eyes in the rear-view mirror… But dignity is difficult to maintain. Stamina requires constant upkeep. Repetition is boring. And you pay for grace.”

“Don’t you understand?” he would say, “You imagine the story better than I remember it.”

“Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.”

“A reader told me recently, in London, said that 'well, I read that you write the last sentence first, so I always read your last sentence first.' And I said, 'oh, no, you're not supposed to do that.”

“[On his process for writing novels:] I can't imagine what the first sentence is, I can't imagine where I want the reader to enter the story, if I don't know where the reader is going to leave the story. So once I know what the last thing the reader hears is, I can work my way backward, like following a roadmap in reverse.”

“The kind of people claiming to be in communication with God today … they are enough to drive a real Christian crazy!”

“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."”