John Irving Quotes

I've had injuries in my life from things beyond my control: runaway horses, helicopters that decide to crash on mountaintops, boating accidents - things that were out of my hands.

Losing one's mother to a car crash at age four isn't a readily accessible idea of good luck, but I've come to accept it as the condition that was required for my luck to fall into place.

A lot of people didn't realize that with the carpet being pulled out from under me in such a short time frame I got to such a bad place.

Life is not orderly. No matter how we try to make life so, right in the middle of it we die, lose a leg, fall in love, drop a jar of applesauce.

Back in 1968, when I was 30, my entire life blew up. I had a life plan, and it collapsed for no rational reason.

In an upside down world, with all the rules being rewritten as the game goes on and spectators invading the pitch, it is good to feel that some things and some people seem to stay just as they were.

As young people we want something to slow us down and keep us trapped in one place long enough to look below the surface of the world. That disaster is a car crash or a war. To make us sit still. It can be getting cancer or getting pregnant. The important part is how it seems to catch us by surprise. That disaster stops us from living the life we'd planned as children - a life of constant dashing around.

To approach the stranger is to invite the unexpected, release a new force, let the genie out of the bottle. It is to start a new train of events that is beyond your control.

But now the world, he thought, had taken them. He knew that this could suddenly happen. One day you just woke up, and there was somewhere that you needed to be.

Life is good, and there's no reason to think it won't be--right up until the moment when everything explodes into a fireball of tiny, unrecognizable fragments, or it all goes skidding sideways, through the guardrail, over the embankment, and down the mountain. This will happen (and probably more than once).

I guess more than anything, I just realized, okay, one day I had a home to live in and my family around me. The next day, I did not.

In football, however well you think you are doing, however well your life is going, there is always a mugger there lurking in the shadows to bash you over the head when you least expect it.

I went to pick my son up from school and walked him back and was in the house preparing dinner, and he came in the house and gave me this flower of chrysanthemum that was full of ants. And he went back out to play and ran out into the street and got hit by a car. The car happened to be driven by a LAPD detective.

You can never control injuries. Accidents happen; that's just how things go.

If it was up to us every single day, then we would all have a perfect life, but stuff happens, but it's an imperfect world.

Non-fictionalised accounts of horrific accidents, bereavement, and the outrages of officialdom tend to move us deeply.

I did get in a car wreck, but we got a good song out of it.

You can't prepare for something that you can't prepare for.

For no fault of mine, I lost everything.

A wet spot on the floor kind of put a scare in myself, so you never know inside those lines what might happen.

Injuries are part of life. We can't decide on that.

Anything Can Happen, on the other hand, is not only about the atrociousness of the September 11 attack, it is also a premonition of the deadly retaliation that was bound to come.

Just when you think you've got your life by the reins, that's when it's most likely to run away with you.

Here I am and there is my body dancing on glass In accident time where there are no accidents You have no choice the choice comes after

The future had suddenly become unknowable: anything could happen: the train of my life had jumped the rails and headed off across the fields and coming down the lane with me, then.