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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“The ideas of justice of Europe and Africa are not the same and those of the one world are unbearable to the other. To the African there is but one way of counter-balancing the catastrophes of existence, it shall be done by replacement; he does not look for the motive of an action. Whether you lie in wait for your enemy and cut his throat in the dark; or you fell a tree, and a thoughtless stranger passes by and is killed; so far as punishment goes, to the Native mind, it is the same thing. A loss has been brought upon the community and must be made up for, somewhere, by somebody. The Native will not give time or thought to the weighing of guilt or desert; either he fears that this may lead him too far, or he reasons that such things are no concerns of his. But he will devote himself, in endless speculations, to the method by which crime or disaster shall be weighed up in sheep and goats - time does not count to him; he leads you solemnly into a sacred maze of sophistry.”
― Isak Dinesen, quote from Out of Africa

“Going to work just looked crazy. Eating another meal, ever, made about as much sense as planting tulip bulbs in the shadow of a falling atom bomb. ”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Haunted

“The legend engraved on the face of the Jewish nickel– on the body of every Jewish child!– not IN GOD WE TRUST, but SOMEDAY YOU'LL BE A PARENT AND YOU'LL KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE.”
― Philip Roth, quote from Portnoy's Complaint

“Satan, on the contrary, is thin, ascetic and a fanatical devotee of logic. He reads Machiavelli, Ignatius of Loyola, Marx and Hegel; he is cold and unmerciful to mankind, out of a kind of mathematical mercifulness. He is damned always to do that which is most repugnant to him: to become a slaughterer, in order to abolish slaughtering, to sacrifice lambs so that no more lambs may be slaughtered, to whip people with knouts so that they may learn not to let themselves be whipped, to strip himself of every scruple in the name of a higher scrupulousness, and to challenge the hatred of mankind because of his love for it--an abstract and geometric love.”
― Arthur Koestler, quote from Darkness at Noon

“Let me first state forthright that contrary to what we've often read in books and heard from preachers, when you are a woman, you don't feel like the Devil. ”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from My Name is Red

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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.

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