John Irving Quotes

Society does not need more children; but it does need more loved children. Quite literally, we cannot afford unloved children - but we pay heavily for them every day. There should not be the slightest communal concern when a woman elects to destroy the life of her thousandth-of-an-ounce embryo. But all society should rise up in alarm when it hears that a baby that is not wanted is about to be born.

My kids motivate me to keep moving forward. My kids are my everything.

I'll just go over to the Duke's," I said. "Her parents already told me I could stay there. I'll go over there and open all my presents, and talk about how my parents neglect me, and then maybe the Duke will give me some of her presents because she feels so bad about how my mom doesn't love me.

You never put her in your heart.

He puts the chain with the locket around my neck, then rests his hand over the spot where our baby would be. “You’re going to make a great mother, you know,” he says. He kisses me one last time and goes back to Finnick.

The day after his father left, Franz and his mother went into town together, and as they left home Franz noticed that her shoes did not match. He was in a quandary: he wanted to point out the mistake, but was afraid he would hurt her. So, during the two hours they spent walking through the city together he kept his eyes focused on her feet. It was then he had his first inkling of what it means to suffer.

I think that being a mom has made me a better person. I'm much more patient and much more chill than I was before.

I'm not going to pretend that bad things don't happen. I just hope my daughter has enough understanding that when they do, just give me a call.

I feel it in me like a woman having a baby, all that life churning inside me. I feel it every day; it moves, stretches, yawns. It's getting ready to be born. It knows exactly what it is.

My father left us three times when I was between three and six. You just couldn't tell - suddenly one day he would leave and then maybe he would come back after six months without telling you why. And then maybe he would disappear again after a year and it's very difficult to take when you are four or five. You just don't know how to handle it and nobody in the family wants to talk about it. My mother didn't know how to tell us and she needed to work because we needed money to live.

You know, once you give birth, once you have kids, you realize what's important in life, and you realize it's really not difficult to be a good person. And so when people aren't good around me, I tend to move away from that. There are so many good people in the world, and you want to surround your children with that.

Grandma, please. It’s okay. Dad’s doing a great job. I give him kudos for at least being calm and rational, and not losing his temper with everyone around him who isn’t in childbirth. And he has yet to start shooting lighting bolts at people. Poor Damien still has a burn scar.” – Kat

Who is getting more pleasure from this rocking, the baby or me?

My favorite thing about being a mom is just what a better person it makes you on a daily basis.

Men should spend less time with guns and more time in childbirth.

even those who call themselves 'intimate' know very little about each other - hardly ever know just how a sorrow is felt, and hurt each other by their very attempts at sympathy or consolation. We can bear no hand on our bruises.

You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.

I'm watching her talk. Watching her jaw move and collecting her words one by one as they spill from her lips. I don't deserve them. Her warm memories. I'd like to paint them over the bare plaster walls of my soul, but everything I paint seems to peel.

She thought of what it would be like to grow up without the one certainty that every baby deseved - when I'm hurt or cold or scared, someone will come and care for me - and how that absence could warp you so that you'd lash out at the people you loved, driving them away when all you wanted to do was pull them closer.

Writing a book is like rearing children -- willpower has very little to do with it. If you have a little baby crying in the middle of the night, and if you depend only on willpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, that baby will starve. You do it out of love.

Let your first interest be in your home. The baby you hold in your arms will grow quickly as the sunrise and the sunset of the rushing days.

When you think the night has seen your mind, That inside your twisted and unkind, Let me stand to show that you are blind. Please put down you hands cause I see you. I'll be you mirror.

Hey. (She took his chin in her hand so that she could move his head back and forth while she examined him.) You’re hurting in there. That would make akri very sad. He doesn’t like for his Dark-Hunters to hurt and the Simi don’t like it when akri is sad. Why are you hurt? (Simi)