If you're God's instrument, Owen, I said, how come you need my help to stuff a basketball?
If you live long enough, Bill - it's a world of epilogues, Richard Abbott said.
If Garp was going to play lacrosse, Jenny thought, where would he go? Not out, because it’s dark; he’d lose the ball.
IT HAS TO DO WITH ALL OF US, said Owen Meany, when I called him that night. SHE WAS JUST LIKE OUR WHOLE COUNTRY—NOT QUITE YOUNG ANYMORE, NOT BUT OLD EITHER; A LITTLE BREATHLESS, VERY BEAUTIFUL, MAYBE...
IT DOESN'T MATTER WHERE YOU LEARNED IT- IT'S A GIFT. IF YOU CARE ABOUT SOMETHING, YOU HAVE TO PROTECT IT. IF YOU'RE LUCKY ENOUGH TO FIND A WAY OF LIFE YOU LOVE, YOU HAVE TO FIND THE COURAGE TO LIVE IT...
IF YOU CARE ABOUT SOMETHING, YOU HAVE TO PROTECT IT—IF YOU’RE LUCKY ENOUGH TO FIND A WAY OF LIFE YOU LOVE, YOU HAVE TO FIND THE COURAGE TO LIVE IT.
IF WE FIRST APPEAR IN THE PLEISTOCENE, I THINK THIS IS WHEN WE DISAPPEAR - I GUESS A MILLION YEARS OF MAN IS ENOUGH
IF SOME PREACHER’S AN ASSHOLE, THAT’S NOT PROOF THAT GOD DOESN’T EXIST! (page 286)
I thought that fanatics would always have an audience; all one might hope to influence was the size of the audience.
I have learned that the consequences of our past actions are always interesting; I have learned to view the present with a forward-looking eye.
I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would still be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a...
I don't want you to describe to me—not ever—what you were doing to that poor boy to make him sound like that; but if you ever do it again, please cover his mouth with your hand.
I can’t read Tess of the d’Urbervilles! I cried. It’s too hard! YOU MEAN IT’S HARD TO MAKE YOURSELF READ IT, YOU MEAN IT’S HARD TO MAKE YOURSELF PAY ATTENTION, he said. BUT IT’S NOT TESS OF THE D’URBE...
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...
How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.
He’d complained to his doctor. The beta-blockers are blocking my memories! Juan Diego cried. They are stealing my childhood—they are robbing my dreams! To his doctor, all this hysteria meant was that...
Here come the characters who comprise the movie vermin, the Hollywood scum, the film slime—the aforementioned unscrupulous cowards of mediocrity. Fortunately, they are minor characters, yet so distast...
He wrote Helen that a young writer needs desperately to live with someone and he had decided that he wanted to live with her; even marry her, he offered, because sex was simply necessary but it took t...
He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
He was asleep—he was still dreaming—though his lips were moving. No one heard him; no one hears a writer who’s writing in his sleep.