black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.

John Irving

In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.
JOHN IRVING

Energy Father Grandmother
No adult in my family would ever tell me anything about who my father was. I knew from an older cousin – only four years older than I am – everything, or what little I could discover about him.
JOHN IRVING

Cousin Father Years
It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
JOHN IRVING

Art Hard Work Serious
…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
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
but writers, Garp knew, were just observers – good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
JOHN IRVING

Behavior Humans Ruthless
Keep passing the open windows.
JOHN IRVING

Depression Encouraging Life
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
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
The former stewardess glared at her ex-pilot husband as if he had been speaking, and thinking, in the absence of sufficient oxygen.
JOHN IRVING

Husband Oxygen Thinking
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
Thus we try to keep our heroes alive; hence we remember them.
JOHN IRVING

Alive Hero Trying
People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both; yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.
JOHN IRVING

People Sound Trying
There is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old.
JOHN IRVING

Four Negotiation Years
I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
JOHN IRVING

Nervous Not Afraid People
He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
JOHN IRVING

Lessons Moral

If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More John Irving Quotes