John Irving · 609 pages
Rating: (185.1K votes)
“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
John Irving
Born place: in Exeter, New Hampshire, The United States
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“And what you thought you came for
is only a shell, a husk of meaning
from which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
if at all. Either you had no purpose
or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfillment.”
― T.S. Eliot, quote from Collected Poems, 1909-1962
“Anna... the night of the summit, when you were saved, it was the only time in my life I've thanked God for anything”
Those words. They would melt me over and over for a long time.”
― Wendy Higgins, quote from Sweet Peril
“Prime numbers are divisible only by 1 and by themselves. They hold their place in the infinite series of natural numbers, squashed, like all numbers, between two others, but one step further than the rest. They are suspicious, solitary numbers, which is why Mattia thought they were wonderful. Sometimes he thought that they had ended up in that sequence by mistake, that they'd been trapped, like pearls strung on a necklace. Other times he suspected that they too would have preferred to be like all the others, just ordinary numbers, but for some reason they couldn't do it. This second thought struck him mostly at night, in the chaotic interweaving of images that comes before sleep, when the mind is too weak to tell itself lies.
In his first year at university, Mattia had learned that, among prime numbers, there are some that are even more special. Mathematicians call them twin primes: pairs of prime numbers that are close to each other, almost neighbors, but between them there is always an even number that prevents them from truly touching. Numbers like 11 and 13, like 17 and 19, 41 and 43. If you have the patience to go on counting, you discover that these pairs gradually become rarer. You encounter increasingly isolated primes, lost in that silent, measured space made only of ciphers, and you develop a distressing presentiment that the pairs encountered up until that point were accidental, that solitude is the true destiny. Then, just when you're about to surrender, when you no longer have the desire to go on counting, you come across another pair of twins, clutching each other tightly. There is a common conviction among mathematicians that however far you go, there will always be another two, even if no one can say where exactly, until they are discovered.”
― Paolo Giordano, quote from The Solitude of Prime Numbers
“We are all so broken. Pick up a person, shake them around and you'll hear the rattling of their broken pieces. Pieces our fathers broke, or our mothers, or our friends, strangers, or our loves.”
― Tarryn Fisher, quote from Thief
“f you'd crack a book, you'd appreciate the connection, but then again, you'd have to learn to read first. -Silas”
― Andrea Cremer, quote from Wolfsbane
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