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I still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.

John Irving

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

Lessons Moral
…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
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
You’re nice,’ Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. ‘And you’re my oldest friend.’ But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends.
JOHN IRVING

Hands Nice Squeezing
O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
JOHN IRVING

Asking Giving Please
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
Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.
JOHN IRVING

Scary Writing
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
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
I don’t begin a novel until I have written, not just the last sentence, but usually, as a result thereof, many of the surrounding final paragraphs, so that in addition to knowing what happens, I know what the voice is.
JOHN IRVING

Finals Knowing Usually Voice
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
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
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
It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
JOHN IRVING

Art Hard Work Serious
Don’t forget this, too: Rumors aren’t interested in the unsensational story; rumors don’t care what’s true.
JOHN IRVING

Care Rumor Stories

I still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.

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I still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.

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