It’s not right to hurt or deceive someone who’s already been hurt and deceived.
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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You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
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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.
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How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.
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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.
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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.
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If pride is a sin … moral pride is the greatest sin.
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I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes – toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings.
JOHN IRVING -
When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother’s hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
JOHN IRVING -
The main character and the most important character are not always the same person – you have to know the difference.
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In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases
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What a phrase that is: ‘that explains everything!’ I know better than to think anything ‘explains everything’ today.
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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.
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but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
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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 -
A writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
JOHN IRVING