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It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.

John Irving

Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
JOHN IRVING

Hatred Loneliness Self
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
The lie, of course, is more interesting.
JOHN IRVING

Courses Interesting Lying
…there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.
JOHN IRVING

Found Safety Viruses
In this world,” Franny once observed, “just as you’re trying to think of yourself as memorable, there is always someone who forgets that that they have met you.
JOHN IRVING

Memorable Thinking Trying
What a phrase that is: ‘that explains everything!’ I know better than to think anything ‘explains everything’ today.
JOHN IRVING

Phrases Thinking Today
The gardener had a dread of small women; he’d always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.
JOHN IRVING

Dread Gardener Size
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
What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman’s freedom of choice, too.
JOHN IRVING

Abortion Choice Choices Freedom
When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother’s hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
JOHN IRVING

Dark Mom Mother
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
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
When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it – rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.
JOHN IRVING

Stories Want Writing
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
The main character and the most important character are not always the same person – you have to know the difference.
JOHN IRVING

Character Differences Important
Our memory is a monster; you forget it – it does not.
JOHN IRVING

Doe Memories Monsters

It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.

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It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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