black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

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.

John Irving

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.
JOHN IRVING

Environment Growth Winning
He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson
JOHN IRVING

Lessons Moral
They all settled into being the kind of friends when they heard from each other…. or when they occasionally got together. And when they were not in touch, they did not think of one another.
JOHN IRVING

Kind Thinking Together
The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it’s not work for me.
JOHN IRVING

Love Reason Writing
Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
JOHN IRVING

Hatred Loneliness Self
I am compulsive about writing, I need to do it the way I need sleep and exercise and food and sex; I can go without it for a while, but then I need it.
JOHN IRVING

Exercise Sex Sleep Writing
The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn’t behave that way you would never do anything.
JOHN IRVING

Minutes Way Writing
Be serious. Life hurts. Reflect what hurts. I don’t mean that you can’t also be funny, or have fun, but at the end of the day, stories are about what you lose.
JOHN IRVING

Fun Hurt Mean Stories
The ability to see the future can be a burden, and the younger you are and the more isolated you feel, maybe the more of a burden it is.
JOHN IRVING

Ability Burden Feels
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
Death, it seems,” Garp wrote, “does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic.
JOHN IRVING

Death Dramatic Indulgent Waiting
I have always believed that, in a story, if something traumatic or calamitous enough happens to a kid at a formative age, that will make him or her the adult they become.
JOHN IRVING

Adults Age Kids
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.
JOHN IRVING

Childhood Events Loss
but writers, Garp knew, were just observers – good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
JOHN IRVING

Behavior Humans Ruthless
I’ve always been slow but I’m even slower now. I’m more into the waiting, or I guess I’m more patient about the waiting.
JOHN IRVING

Change More Patient Waiting

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More John Irving Quotes