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And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won’t forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.

John Irving

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
Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.
JOHN IRVING

Combat Comforting Loneliness
YOU LET ME DROWN!” Owen said. “YOU DIDN’T DO ANYTHING! YOU JUST WATCHED ME DROWN! I’M ALREADY DEAD!” he told us. “REMEMBER THAT: YOU LET ME DIE.
JOHN IRVING

Anything Dead Remember Watched
If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves.
JOHN IRVING

Caricatures Enough Long
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
Your memory is a monster; you forget – it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you – and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!
JOHN IRVING

Memories Monsters Thinking
I have a friend who says that reviewers are the tickbirds of the literary rhinoceros-but he is being kind. Tickbirds perform a valuable service to the rhino and the rhino hardly notices the birds.
JOHN IRVING

Be Kind Bird Rhinos
As it was, things went from bad to worse, as they often will when amateurs are involved in an activity that they perform in bad temper – or in a hurry.
JOHN IRVING

Activity Bad Temper
It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
JOHN IRVING

Exhausting Knows Seventeen
Patriotism is not necessarily defined as blind devotion to a president’s particular agenda – and that to dispute a presidential policy is not necessarily anti-American.
JOHN IRVING

Agendas Blind Presidential
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
Our memory is a monster; you forget it – it does not.
JOHN IRVING

Doe Memories Monsters
In an episodic treatment, such as a teleplay is, you have the ability to do what you can do in a novel, which is flash back and flash forward in the same instant, in the same scene, in the same voice.
JOHN IRVING

Scene Treatment Voice
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
There are always suicides among people who are unable to say what they mean.
JOHN IRVING

Mean People Suicide
I suppose I’m proudest of my novels for what’s imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.
JOHN IRVING

Imagination Interesting Thinking

And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won’t forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.

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And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won’t forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More John Irving Quotes