Quotes from The World According to Garp

“They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.”
― John Irving, quote from The World According to Garp

“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, quote from The World According to Garp

“Imagining something is better than remembering something.”
― John Irving, quote from The World According to Garp

“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.”
― John Irving, quote from The World According to Garp

“In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases”
― John Irving, quote from The World According to Garp

“You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.”
― John Irving, quote from The World According to Garp

“All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.”
― John Irving, quote from The World According to Garp

“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. ”
― John Irving, quote from The World According to Garp

“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, quote from The World According to Garp

“Oh FUCK the longings and agonies of youth.”
― John Irving, quote from The World According to Garp

“The history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories. ”
― John Irving, quote from The World According to Garp

“It is an important distinction to note that she looked not only as if she had taken good care of herself, but that she had good reason to have done so. (...) She looked to be in such total possession of her life that only the most confident men could continue to look at her if she looked back at them. Even in bus stations, she was a woman who was stared at only until she looked back.”
― John Irving, quote from The World According to Garp

“A woman half dressed seemed to have some power, but a man was simply not as handsome as when he was naked, and not as secure as when he was clothed.”
― John Irving, quote from The World According to Garp

“In this dirty-minded world you are either somebody's wife or somebody's whore, or fast on your way to becoming one or the other.”
― John Irving, quote from The World According to Garp

“Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.”
― John Irving, quote from The World According to Garp

“She felt detached from her family, and thought it strange how they had lavished so much attention on her, as a child, and then at some appointed, prearranged time they seemed to stop the flow of affection and being the expectations - as if, for a brief phrase, you were expected to absorb love (and get enough), and then, for a much longer and more serious phase, you were expected to fulfill certain obligations.”
― John Irving, quote from The World According to Garp

“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.”
― John Irving, quote from The World According to Garp

“but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.”
― John Irving, quote from The World According to Garp

“Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax..”
― John Irving, quote from The World According to Garp

“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, quote from The World According to Garp

“There are always suicides," Garp wrote, "among people who are unable to say what they mean".”
― John Irving, quote from The World According to Garp

“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, quote from The World According to Garp

“A novelist is a doctor who sees only terminal cases.”
― John Irving, quote from The World According to Garp

“In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?”
― John Irving, quote from The World According to Garp

“She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.”
― John Irving, quote from The World According to Garp

“He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson”
― John Irving, quote from The World According to Garp

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Popular quotes

“No one chooses which culture to be born into or can be blamed for how that culture evolved in past centuries.”
― Thomas Sowell, quote from Black Rednecks and White Liberals

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

Her head tilted to the side and she smiled. “That’s why I want to do this more than ever.” Her eyelashes fluttered against her cheeks. “Because you care enough to stop at the thought of causing me pain. Because, even though I can see how desperately you want to be inside me, you’re going slow, you’re making sure I’m safe.”

“Because you’re my girl,” I replied. Elsie’s eyes glossed at my statement.”
― Tillie Cole, quote from Sweet Soul

“Then, just as we were to leave on a whirlwind honeymoon in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, a call came from Australia. Steve’s friend John Stainton had word that a big croc had been frequenting areas too close to civilization, and someone had been taking potshots at him.
“It’s a big one, Stevo, maybe fourteen or fifteen feet,” John said over the phone. “I hate to catch you right at this moment, but they’re going to kill him unless he gets relocated.”
John was one of Australia’s award-winning documentary filmmakers. He and Steve had met in the late 1980s, when Steve would help John shoot commercials that required a zoo animal like a lizard or a turtle. But their friendship did not really take off until 1990, when an Australian beer company hired John to film a tricky shot involving a crocodile.
He called Steve. “They want a bloke to toss a coldie to another bloke, but a croc comes out of the water and snatches at it. The guy grabs the beer right in front of the croc’s jaws. You think that’s doable?”
“Sure, mate, no problem at all,” Steve said with his usual confidence. “Only one thing, it has to be my hand in front of the croc.”
John agreed. He journeyed up to the zoo to film the commercial. It was the first time he had seen Steve on his own turf, and he was impressed. He was even more impressed when the croc shoot went off flawlessly.
Monty, the saltwater crocodile, lay partially submerged in his pool. An actor fetched a coldie from the esky and tossed it toward Steve. As Steve’s hand went above Monty’s head, the crocodile lunged upward in a food response. On film it looked like the croc was about to snatch the can--which Steve caught right in front of his jaws. John was extremely impressed. As he left the zoo after completing the commercial shoot, Steve gave him a collection of VHS tapes.
Steve had shot the videotapes himself. The raw footage came from Steve simply propping his camera in a tree, or jamming it into the mud, and filming himself single-handedly catching crocs.
John watched the tapes when he got home to Brisbane. He told me later that what he saw was unbelievable. “It was three hours of captivating film and I watched it straight through, twice,” John recalled to me. “It was Steve. The camera loved him.”
He rang up his contacts in television and explained that he had a hot property. The programmers couldn’t use Steve’s original VHS footage, but one of them had a better idea. He gave John the green light to shoot his own documentary of Steve.
That led to John Stainton’s call to Oregon on the eve of our honeymoon.
“I know it’s not the best timing, mate,” John said, “but we could take a crew and film a documentary of you rescuing this crocodile.”
Steve turned to me. Honeymoon or crocodile? For him, it wasn’t much of a quandary. But what about me?”
“Let’s go,” I replied.”
― Terri Irwin, quote from Steve & Me

“If you had yourself cloned, who exactly, would be your parents? Can you raise yourself? I guess so. And it might be fun. Just think, by the age of six you'd be driving yourself to school.”
― George Carlin, quote from When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?

“She was coming to look on men and women as fellow-survivors: well-dissemblers of their woes, who, with few signals of grief, had contained, assimilated, or put to use their own destruction. Of those who had endured the worst, not all behaved nobly or consistently. but all, involuntarily, became part of some deeper assertion of life.”
― Shirley Hazzard, quote from The Transit of Venus

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

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