John Irving - The World According to Garp (1978)

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Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.

John Irving
A sentence boiled in her, but she could not yet see it clearly.

John Irving
Kids are beautiful, man. And they know much more than grownups think they know. Kids are just perfect people until grownups get their hands on them.

John Irving
Death, it seems," Garp wrote, "does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic.

John Irving
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
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
He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson

John Irving
They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.

John Irving
In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.

John Irving
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
He wrote Helen that "a part of adolescence is feeling that there's no one else around you who's enough like yourself to understand you."

John Irving
All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.

John Irving
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
We don't always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly—as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth—the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives

John Irving
She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything—maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.

John Irving
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
I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave - and nothing but laughter to console them with.

John Irving
You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.

John Irving
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
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
Imagination, he realized, came harder than memory.

John Irving
Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax..

John Irving
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
Imagining something is better than remembering something.

John Irving