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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“Will this generation be able to turn things around and learn a valuable lesson from all of this? I hope so, but I have my doubts. The damage has been done. And as a lifelong student of history, it's quite evident that human beings don't learn from the mistakes of past generations.”
― quote from Voluntary
“students who were told to think about the happiest day of their lives right before taking a standardized math test outperformed their peers.19 And people who expressed more positive emotions while negotiating business deals did so more efficiently and successfully than those who were more neutral or negative.”
― Shawn Achor, quote from The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work
“No one, certainly no teenager, was normal or felt they were. Everyone wore a kind of mask that kept people from really seeing what - or who - was inside”
― Gregg Olsen, quote from Envy
“If greed were not the master of modern man--ably assisted by envy--how could it be that the frenzy of economism does not abate as higher "standards of living" are attained, and that it is precisely the richest societies which pursue their economic advantage with the greatest ruthlessness? How could we explain the almost universal refusal on the part of the rulers of the rich societies--where organized along private enterprise or collective enterprise lines--to work towards the humanisation of work? It is only necessary to assert that something would reduce the "standard of living" and every debate is instantly closed. That soul-destroying, meaningless, mechanical, monotonous, moronic work is an insult to human nature which must necessarily and inevitably produce either escapism or aggression, and that no amount of of "bread and circuses" can compensate for the damage done--these are facts which are neither denied nor acknowledged but are met with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence--because to deny them would be too obviously absurd and to acknowledge them would condemn the central preoccupation of modern society as a crime against humanity.”
― Ernst F. Schumacher, quote from Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered
“You owe me."
"What do I owe you? All the things I gave you. How I took care of you. Money, information...pleasure. I denied you nothing. If I could give it to you, I did."
"You gave me things that cost you nothing. It certainly didn't seem to be a hardship to fuck me.”
― Caroline Hanson, quote from Love Is Mortal
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