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This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.

John Irving

How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.
JOHN IRVING

Eyes Love People Things
It is exhausting to be seventeen and not know who you are.
JOHN IRVING

Exhausting Knows Seventeen
Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else’s religion practiced on us.
JOHN IRVING

Practice Religious Two
… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.
JOHN IRVING

Heart Normal Symtons
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
You can’t learn everything you need to know legally.
JOHN IRVING

Feet Knows Needs
My life is a reading list.
JOHN IRVING

Life Lists Reading
I’ve always preferred writing in longhand. I’ve always written first drafts in longhand.
JOHN IRVING

Firsts Writing Written
They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.
JOHN IRVING

Awkward Procedures Regret
Wrestling was my first success, the first thing that confirmed that I could be good at anything. Devoting yourself to wrestling, or tennis, or skiing, or dance, or to a musical instrument is a longing to be disciplined for a purpose.
JOHN IRVING

Musical Tennis Wrestling
…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
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 still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.
JOHN IRVING

Believe Children Church
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
What a phrase that is: ‘that explains everything!’ I know better than to think anything ‘explains everything’ today.
JOHN IRVING

Phrases Thinking Today
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
JOHN IRVING

Stories Victim Writing
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 know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I’m going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life
JOHN IRVING

Adventure Everybody Father Real
Life is serious but art is fun!
JOHN IRVING

Art Fun Life
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
Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century; that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyÕre going someplace.
JOHN IRVING

Creative Maps Writing
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
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
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

Book Memories Tears
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

Love People Wind
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
We permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it – and reward it in all manner of ways.
JOHN IRVING

Country Rewards Way

This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.

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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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Popular Authors

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