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O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.

John Irving

I think now that is the nature of hymns-they make us want to repeat them…they are a part of any service, and often the only part of a funeral service, that makes us feel everything is acceptable.
JOHN IRVING

Funeral Hymns Thinking
My life is a reading list.
JOHN IRVING

Life Lists Reading
I’ve always been slow but I’m even slower now. I’m more into the waiting, or I guess I’m more patient about the waiting.
JOHN IRVING

Change More Patient Waiting
A sentence boiled in her, but she could not yet see it clearly.
JOHN IRVING

Boiled Life Sentences
There’s no reason you shouldn’t, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.
JOHN IRVING

Aware Constantly Reason
If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
JOHN IRVING

Finished Process Product
I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.
JOHN IRVING

Next Novel Writing
You can’t learn everything you need to know legally.
JOHN IRVING

Feet Knows Needs
…I suddenly realized what small towns are. They are places where you grow up with the peculiar-you live next door to the strange and the unlikely for so long that everything and everyone become commonplace.
JOHN IRVING

Doors Growing Long
…there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.
JOHN IRVING

Found Safety Viruses
No adult in my family would ever tell me anything about who my father was. I knew from an older cousin – only four years older than I am – everything, or what little I could discover about him.
JOHN IRVING

Cousin Father Years
Don’t you understand?” he would say, “You imagine the story better than I remember it.
JOHN IRVING

Imagine Remember Stories
There are always suicides among people who are unable to say what they mean.
JOHN IRVING

Mean People Suicide
Being reviewed is being condescended to by your inferiors.
JOHN IRVING

Condescend Inferiors People
I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn’t terribly painful.
JOHN IRVING

Sunday Teenage Years
I’m not a movie person. They’re collaborations of the worst kind. You must compromise yourself to many interests that are venal and crass and do not have your best interests at heart.
JOHN IRVING

Collaboration Compromise Heart

O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.

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O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.

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