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If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves.

John Irving

He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
JOHN IRVING

Coincidence Novel Young
This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
JOHN IRVING

Centered Religion Self
It’s a no-win argument – that business of what we’re born with and what our environment does to us. And it’s a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.
JOHN IRVING

Environment Growth Winning
You can’t say you’re going to ban something in the name of good taste, because then you have directed someone to play the role of good-taste police. We – Americans – permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it.
JOHN IRVING

Country Names Play
O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
JOHN IRVING

Asking Giving Please
There are always suicides among people who are unable to say what they mean.
JOHN IRVING

Mean People Suicide
Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents’ own rule.
JOHN IRVING

Children Moments Parent
You’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 IRVING

Hands Nice Squeezing
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
It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
JOHN IRVING

Exhausting Knows Seventeen
My brain is sending poison to my heart.
JOHN IRVING

Brain Heart Poison
I still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.
JOHN IRVING

Believe Children Church
I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft.
JOHN IRVING

Book Long Writing
The building of the architecture of a novel – the craft of it – is something I never tire of.
JOHN IRVING

Architecture Crafts Writing
Being reviewed is being condescended to by your inferiors.
JOHN IRVING

Condescend Inferiors People
He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
JOHN IRVING

Lessons Moral

If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves.

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If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves.

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