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 IRVINGA 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.
More John Irving Quotes
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What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.
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In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us — not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.
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My brain is sending poison to my heart.
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It’s not right to hurt or deceive someone who’s already been hurt and deceived.
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This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
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No one could have fathomed what a life he’d led, for it was chiefly a life lived in his mind.
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Kids are beautiful, man. And they know much more than grownups think they know. Kids are just perfect people until grownups get their hands on them.
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…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 -
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.
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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.
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In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases
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It doesn’t really matter who said it – it’s so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.
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Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.
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Life,” Garp wrote, “is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead an end occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that is left is memory. But even a nihilist has memory.
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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