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Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.

John Irving

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 cannot drive with your eyes in the rear-view mirror… But dignity is difficult to maintain. Stamina requires constant upkeep. Repetition is boring. And you pay for grace.
JOHN IRVING

Eye Mirrors Repetition Views
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
…there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.
JOHN IRVING

Found Safety Viruses
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
When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother’s hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
JOHN IRVING

Dark Mom Mother
Life is an X-rated soap opera.
JOHN IRVING

Life Opera Soap
The main character and the most important character are not always the same person – you have to know the difference.
JOHN IRVING

Character Differences Important
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
When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it – rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.
JOHN IRVING

Stories Want Writing
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.
JOHN IRVING

Cancer Reading Real
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
Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.
JOHN IRVING

Combat Comforting Loneliness
In this world,” Franny once observed, “just as you’re trying to think of yourself as memorable, there is always someone who forgets that that they have met you.
JOHN IRVING

Memorable Thinking Trying
O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
JOHN IRVING

Asking Giving Please
Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.
JOHN IRVING

Majority People Population

Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.

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Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.

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