|
542150b
|
When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time--the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes--when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever--there co..
|
|
grief
loss
|
John Irving |
|
b7f0fdb
|
If you care about something you have to protect it - If you're lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.
|
|
|
John Irving |
|
ae02c30
|
You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
|
|
life-lessons
wrestling
|
John Irving |
|
adb626e
|
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 will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!
|
|
|
John Irving |
|
c2bf560
|
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.
|
|
sad
|
John Irving |
|
8a68abc
|
They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.
|
|
leaving
final
regret
|
John Irving |
|
b9e683c
|
My life is a reading list.
|
|
reading
|
John Irving |
|
802888f
|
Keep passing the open windows.
|
|
suicide
perseverance
|
John Irving |
|
9c5dbfd
|
We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.
|
|
self-discovery
perspective
revelation
|
John Irving |
|
016feb7
|
It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
|
|
work
life
|
John Irving |
|
485cd42
|
In this dirty minded world, you are either someone's wife or someone's whore. And if you're not either people think there is something wrong with you....but there is nothing wrong with me
|
|
|
John Irving |
|
99e2514
|
Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.
|
|
|
John Irving |
|
d18a933
|
Never confuse faith, or belief--of any kind--with something even remotely intellectual.
|
|
|
John Irving |
|
4a7eefe
|
The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.
|
|
|
John Irving |
|
eeff777
|
People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.
|
|
|
John Irving |
|
0d62364
|
In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us -- not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.
|
|
|
John Irving |
|
b307da5
|
So we dream on. Thus we invent our lives. We give ourselves a sainted mother, we make our father a hero; and someone's older brother and someone's older sister - they become our heroes too. We invent what we love and what we fear. There is always a brave lost brother - and a little lost sister, too. We dream on and on: the best hotel, the perfect family, the resort life. And our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them... T..
|
|
|
John Irving |
|
cb3c0d2
|
Imagining something is better than remembering something.
|
|
|
John Irving |
|
645e09d
|
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 |
|
ddcbdad
|
If you are careful,' Garp wrote, 'if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day; what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane.
|
|
love
|
John Irving |
|
a4fc75d
|
I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
|
|
|
John Irving |
|
436d67b
|
it's not god who's fucked up, it's the screamers who say they believe in him and who claim to pursue their ends in his holy name.
|
|
zealots
|
John Irving |
|
2ecdeba
|
It's natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you have to let everything happen to them. You can't interfere with people you love any more than you're supposed to interfere with people you don't even know. And that's hard, ..., because you often feel like interfering -you want to be the one who makes the plans.
|
|
|
John Irving |
|
d580acc
|
In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases
|
|
|
John Irving |
|
7af99c7
|
A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy
|
|
woman
women
happiness
|
John Irving |
|
3d71d63
|
When time passes, it's the people who knew you whom you want to see; they're the ones you can talk to. When enough time passes, what's it matter what they did to you?
|
|
homecoming
home
|
John Irving |
|
cd2e27b
|
It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don't expect me to change.
|
|
|
John Irving |
|
2be9c56
|
Every American should be forced to live outside the United States for a year or two. Americans should be forced to see how ridiculous they appear to the rest of the world! They should listen to someone else's version of themselves--to anyone else's version! Every country knows more about America than Americans know about themselves! And Americans know absolutely nothing about any other country!
|
|
|
John Irving |
|
53ce4b1
|
Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean--make sure know what they mean!
|
|
|
John Irving |
|
8a84c35
|
If watching television doesn't hasten death, it surely manages to make death very inviting; for television so shamelessly sentimentalizes and romanticizes death that it makes the living feel they have missed something - just by staying alive.
|
|
|
John Irving |
|
0ae0ee7
|
You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.
|
|
|
John Irving |
|
d321218
|
the consequences of sex are often more memorable than the act itself.
|
|
|
John Irving |
|
7d0a74e
|
The desire to never leave your side, the desire to never see you again. The desire to see your face asleep on the pillow beside my face and to see your eyes open in the morning when I lie next to you--just watching you, waiting for you to wake up.
|
|
|
John Irving |
|
4523d16
|
You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
|
|
|
John Irving |
|
91ca108
|
I want to go on being a student," I told him. "I want to be a teacher. I'm just a reader," I said. "DON'T SOUND SO ASHAMED," he said. "READING IS A GIFT." "I learned it from you," I told him. "IT DOESN'T MATTER WHERE YOU LEARNED IT- IT'S A GIFT. IF YOU CARE ABOUT SOMETHING, YOU HAVE TO PROTECT IT. IF YOU'RE LUCKY ENOUGH TO FIND A WAY OF LIFE YOU LOVE, YOU HAVE TO FIND THE COURAGE TO LIVE IT."
|
|
|
John Irving |
|
d072210
|
These same people who tell us we must defend the lives of the unborn-they are the same people who seem not so interested in defending anyone but themselves after the accident of birth is complete! These same people who profess their love of the unborn's soul-they don't care to make much of a contribution to the poor, they don't care to offer much assistance to the unwanted or the oppressed! How do they justify such a concern for the fetus a..
|
|
|
John Irving |
|
935dd17
|
We don't always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly--as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth--the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives
|
|
|
John Irving |
|
98c4bba
|
Logic is relative.
|
|
|
John Irving |
|
32ae506
|
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 |
|
5b7b5f6
|
All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.
|
|
transgender
|
John Irving |
|
fede3fd
|
Crazy people made him crazy. It was as if he personally resented them giving into madness - in part, because he so frequently labored to behave sanely. When some people gave up the labor of sanity, or failed at it, Garp suspected them of not trying hard enough.
|
|
sanity
|
John Irving |
|
f51b03a
|
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 |
|
aa33d71
|
Human beings are remarkable - at what we can learn to live with. If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough, could we? What else makes us strong?
|
|
|
John Irving |
|
212b3a7
|
What do Americans know about morality? They don't want their presidents to have penises but they don't mind if their presidents covertly arrange to support the Nicaraguan rebel forces after Congress has restricted such aid; they don't want their presidents to deceive their wives but they don't mind if their presidents deceive Congress- lie to the people and violate the people's constitution!
|
|
|
John Irving |