John Irving Quotes About Fathers

Quotes about: Fathers

• You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I'm going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life

  John Irving

  Father, Real, Adventure

  "The World According to Garp". www.imdb.com. 1982.

• And Father said, “There are no happy endings.” “Right!” cried Iowa Bob – an odd mixture of exuberance and stoicism in his cracked voice. “Death is horrible, final, and frequently premature,” Coach Bob declared. “So what?” my father said. “Right!” cried Iowa Bob. “That’s the point: So what?” Thus the family maxim was that an unhappy ending did not undermine a rich and energetic life. This was based on the belief that there were no happy endings.

  John Irving

  Father, Iowa, Voice

  "The Hotel New Hampshire". Book by John Irving, 1981.

• In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.

  John Irving

  Father, Grandmother, Energy

  John Irving (1978). “The world according to Garp”, Pocket

• So we dream on. Thus we invent our lives. We give ourselves a sainted mother, we make our father a hero; and someone’s older brother and someone’s older sister – they become our heroes too. We invent what we love and what we fear. There is always a brave lost brother – and a little lost sister, too. We dream on and on: the best hotel, the perfect family, the resort life. And our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them.

  John Irving

  Mother, Dream, Brother

  John Irving (1986). “The Hotel New Hampshire”

• The first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life led by human beings; the second was that human beings could survive a life in hotels.

  John Irving

  Father, Firsts, Bears

• Before I began The Cider House Rules, I thought I wanted to write about a father-son relationship that was closer, more conflicted, and ultimately more loving, than most. Then I began to think of a relationship between an old orphanage director and an unadoptable orphan - a kid who goes out into the world and fails and keeps coming back, so that the old guy ends up with someone he's got to keep.

  John Irving

  Father, Kids, Writing

  Interview with Suzanne Herel, www.motherjones.com. May/June 1997.

• No adult in my family would ever tell me anything about who my father was. I knew from an older cousin - only four years older than I am - everything, or what little I could discover about him.

  John Irving

  Cousin, Father, Years

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