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

“Things mechanical are like the ladies,’ continued Toby. ‘You need to understand their ways. If you understand them, they’ll do what you want from the start. If you don’t, they’ve got you. And then God help you.”
― Robert Aickman, quote from The Wine-Dark Sea

“One must never forget when misfortunes come that it is quite possible they are saving one from something much worse; or that when you make some great mistake, it may very easily serve you better than the best-advised decision.”
― Winston S. Churchill, quote from Churchill: The Power of Words

“It’s useless.” “You will find it,” he insisted, misinterpreting her meaning, “if your heart is open. So a way must be made for your heart to be open. I must change part of our bargain.” Summer lowered her brows. “Are you planning to manipulate me again, Mr. Ollenburger?” “No manipulate. Only say this—if you teach my son, you must go to church with us. Church, like laughter, is good for the soul.”
― Kim Vogel Sawyer, quote from Waiting for Summer's Return

“Seasons is a wise metaphor for the movement of life, I think. It suggests that life is neither a battlefield nor a game of chance but something infinitely richer, more promising, more real. The notion that our lives are like the eternal cycle of the seasons does not deny the struggle or the joy, the loss or the gain, the darkness or the light, but encourages us to embrace it all-and to find in all of it opportunities for growth.
If we lived close to nature in an agricultural society, the seasons as metaphor and fact would continually frame our lives. But the master metaphor of our era does not come from
agriculture-it comes from manufacturing. We do not believe that we "grow" our lives-we believe that we "make" them. Just listen to how we use the word in everyday speech: we make time, make friends, snake meaning, make money, make a living, make love.
I once heard Alan Watts observe that a Chinese child will ask, "How does a baby grow?" But an American child will ask, "How do you make a baby?" From an early age, we absorb our culture's arrogant conviction that we manufacture everything, reducing the world to mere "raw material" that lacks all value until we impose our designs and labor on it.”
― Parker J. Palmer, quote from Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation

“La felicidad y la desdicha estan a veces muy cerca. Expresado de otra forma se podria decir que la felicidad da a veces curiosos rodeos”
― Nicolas Barreau, quote from The Ingredients of Love

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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.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.