John Irving Quotes

You write your life story by the choices you make. You never know if they have been a mistake. Those moments of decision are so difficult.

Life is filled with difficult decisions, he thought. And winners are those who make them.

It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.

The difficulty in life is the choice.

Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.

Life is a matter of really tough choices.

You have to make difficult choices in your life, and you just have to be happy with them.

We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork, you must make a decision.

We all have to make choices in life.

For every path you choose, there is another you must abandon, usually forever.

Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do.

You just try to make the best decisions you can. You just take life as it comes to you and do your best.

I will always need to compromise and make choices - you just have to work hard at making the right choice day by day.

Where you are going to spend your time and your energy is one of the most important decisions you get to make in life.

Most of life's actions are within our reach, but decisions take willpower.

Sometimes in life you have to make a decision and make sacrifices.

On every journey you take, you are met with options. At every fork in the road, you make a choice. These are the decisions that shape your life.

I think there are crossroads in our lives when we make grand, sweeping decisions without even realizing it.

In every life there comes a point when you have to make a decision about how you will live.

You make what seems a simple choice: choose a man or a job or a neighborhood- and what you have chosen is not a man or a job or a neighborhood, but a life.

It's the story of my life. You see, the quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead. Now, as you look through this document you'll see that I've underlined all the major decisions I ever made to make the stand out. They're all indexed and cross-referenced. See? All I can suggest is that if you take decisions that are exactly opposite to the sort of decisions that I've taken, then maybe you won't finish up at the end of your life" --she paused, and filled her lungs for a good should--"in a smelly old cave like this!

Everybody grows up and they have to make decisions, and they try and make the best decisions that they know how to. It's taken them their whole lives to finally step out and start making their own decisions.

My life is a party thrown for me by my own decisions.

There are some decisions in life that only you can make.

The small day-to-day decisions will determine the course of your lives.