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A Prayer for Owen Meany

John Irving

Top 10 Best Quotes

“When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.”

“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.”

“Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!”

“My life is a reading list.”

“Never confuse faith, or belief—of any kind—with something even remotely intellectual.”

“The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.”

“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 he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.”

“it's not god who's fucked up, it's the screamers who say they believe in him and who claim to pursue their ends in his holy name.”

“A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy”

“Every American should be forced to live outside the United States for a year or two. Americans should be forced to see how ridiculous they appear to the rest of the world! They should listen to someone else's version of themselves--to anyone else's version! Every country knows more about America than Americans know about themselves! And Americans know absolutely nothing about any other country!”

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Book Keywords:

crazy, grief, christian-behavior, loss, reading, death, happiness, life, woman, women, memory, zealots

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