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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

A part of adolescence is feelimg that there’s no one else around who’s enough like youself to understand you.
JOHN IRVING

Adolescence Enough Like
…every study of the gods, of everyone’s gods, is a revelation of vengeance towards the innocent.
JOHN IRVING

Innocent Study Vengeance
He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
JOHN IRVING

Lessons Moral
Our memory is a monster; you forget it – it does not.
JOHN IRVING

Doe Memories Monsters
A sentence boiled in her, but she could not yet see it clearly.
JOHN IRVING

Boiled Life Sentences
When writing a novel, I’m not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don’t know what it is.
JOHN IRVING

Enough Smart Writing
In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases
JOHN IRVING

Cases Meany Owen World
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
What a phrase that is: ‘that explains everything!’ I know better than to think anything ‘explains everything’ today.
JOHN IRVING

Phrases Thinking Today
I have no respect for the right-to-life position, though I have every respect for an individual who says, “I could never have that procedure, I could never see a film or read a book about that procedure.” It doesn’t bother me if people feel that way.
JOHN IRVING

Book People Procedure Way
…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
I don’t begin a novel until I have written, not just the last sentence, but usually, as a result thereof, many of the surrounding final paragraphs, so that in addition to knowing what happens, I know what the voice is.
JOHN IRVING

Finals Knowing Usually Voice
My brain is sending poison to my heart.
JOHN IRVING

Brain Heart Poison
There’s nothing as scary as the future.
JOHN IRVING

Future Nothing Scary
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 doesn’t really matter who said it – it’s so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.
JOHN IRVING

Matter Said Something Writing

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.

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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.

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Popular Authors

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