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People only ask questions when they’re ready to hear the answers.

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
If you asked me one day, I might say, “Well, sometimes I feel a little bit religious.” If you asked me another day, I’d just say flat out, “No.”
JOHN IRVING

Another Day Religious
It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don’t expect me to change.
JOHN IRVING

Faults Meany Owen Responsibility
When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother’s hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
JOHN IRVING

Dark Mom Mother
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 IRVING

Ability Burden Feels
In an episodic treatment, such as a teleplay is, you have the ability to do what you can do in a novel, which is flash back and flash forward in the same instant, in the same scene, in the same voice.
JOHN IRVING

Scene Treatment Voice
I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
JOHN IRVING

Nervous Not Afraid People
It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
JOHN IRVING

Exhausting Knows Seventeen
The powerful wind swept his hair away from his face; he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he’d not yet seen.
JOHN IRVING

Hair Ocean Powerful
So, I don’t work in terms of real time. I don’t work in a timely fashion.
JOHN IRVING

Fashion Real Term Work
Keep passing the open windows.
JOHN IRVING

Depression Encouraging Life
Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.
JOHN IRVING

Combat Comforting Loneliness
It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
JOHN IRVING

Art Hard Work Serious
If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves.
JOHN IRVING

Caricatures Enough Long
You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
JOHN IRVING

Obsessed Obsession Psychology
What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.
JOHN IRVING

Love People Wind

People only ask questions when they’re ready to hear the answers.

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People only ask questions when they’re ready to hear the answers.

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