The former stewardess glared at her ex-pilot husband as if he had been speaking, and thinking, in the absence of sufficient oxygen.
JOHN IRVINGYou only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
More John Irving Quotes
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Thus we try to keep our heroes alive; hence we remember them.
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Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
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They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.
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but writers, Garp knew, were just observers – good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
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Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents’ own rule.
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Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
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My life is a reading list.
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…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.
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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.
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A part of adolescence is feelimg that there’s no one else around who’s enough like youself to understand you.
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In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases
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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.”
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Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
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It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
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It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don’t expect me to change.
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There’s no reason you shouldn’t, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.
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I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.
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We permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it – and reward it in all manner of ways.
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… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.
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It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
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When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother’s hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
JOHN IRVING -
…there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.
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Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer’s irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn’t reading.
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I have always believed that, in a story, if something traumatic or calamitous enough happens to a kid at a formative age, that will make him or her the adult they become.
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Life,” 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 IRVING -
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