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He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson

John Irving

All I say is: Let us leave les folles alone; let’s just leave them be. Don’t judge them. You are not superior to them – don’t put them down.
JOHN IRVING

Judging Superiors Tolerance
He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.
JOHN IRVING

Optimism Quality Risk
I still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.
JOHN IRVING

Believe Children Church
A novel is a piece of architecture. It’s not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It’s a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.
JOHN IRVING

Diaries Floor Wall Writing
Being reviewed is being condescended to by your inferiors.
JOHN IRVING

Condescend Inferiors People
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
You don’t want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.
JOHN IRVING

Character Giving People
When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother’s hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
JOHN IRVING

Dark Mom Mother
but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
JOHN IRVING

Friend Good Meany Owen Supportive
Life is an X-rated soap opera.
JOHN IRVING

Life Opera Soap
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
It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
JOHN IRVING

Exhausting Knows Seventeen
I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.
JOHN IRVING

Dying Finding Student Yourself
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
Keep passing the open windows.
JOHN IRVING

Depression Encouraging Life
Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
JOHN IRVING

Hatred Loneliness Self

He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson

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He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson

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