He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
JOHN IRVINGLife,” Garp wrote, “is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead an end occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that is left is memory. But even a nihilist has memory.
More John Irving Quotes
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but writers, Garp knew, were just observers – good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
JOHN IRVING -
Our memory is a monster; you forget it – it does not.
JOHN IRVING -
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 -
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 -
What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman’s freedom of choice, too.
JOHN IRVING -
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 -
You can’t learn everything you need to know legally.
JOHN IRVING -
Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.
JOHN IRVING -
Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents’ own rule.
JOHN IRVING -
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 -
If you asked me one day, I might say, “Well, sometimes I feel a little bit religious.” If you asked me another day, I’d just say flat out, “No.”
JOHN IRVING -
Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
JOHN IRVING -
I think now that is the nature of hymns-they make us want to repeat them…they are a part of any service, and often the only part of a funeral service, that makes us feel everything is acceptable.
JOHN IRVING -
…there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.
JOHN IRVING -
Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.
JOHN IRVING