The ability to see the future can be a burden, and the younger you are and the more isolated you feel, maybe the more of a burden it is.
JOHN IRVINGThe ability to see the future can be a burden, and the younger you are and the more isolated you feel, maybe the more of a burden it is.
JOHN IRVINGI have a friend who says that reviewers are the tickbirds of the literary rhinoceros-but he is being kind. Tickbirds perform a valuable service to the rhino and the rhino hardly notices the birds.
JOHN IRVINGIf pride is a sin … moral pride is the greatest sin.
JOHN IRVINGLife is an X-rated soap opera.
JOHN IRVINGKeep passing the open windows.
JOHN IRVINGYou’re nice,’ Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. ‘And you’re my oldest friend.’ But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends.
JOHN IRVINGJust when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can’t even remember having met you
JOHN IRVINGLife,” Garp wrote, “is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead an end occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that is left is memory. But even a nihilist has memory.
JOHN IRVINGHow we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.
JOHN IRVINGIn the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases
JOHN IRVINGRituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.
JOHN IRVINGO God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
JOHN IRVINGHe also knew that rivals are best unmanned by being ignored.
JOHN IRVINGBe serious. Life hurts. Reflect what hurts. I don’t mean that you can’t also be funny, or have fun, but at the end of the day, stories are about what you lose.
JOHN IRVINGThe former stewardess glared at her ex-pilot husband as if he had been speaking, and thinking, in the absence of sufficient oxygen.
JOHN IRVINGNearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.
JOHN IRVING