Hello and Welcome. This page is a collection of 21 quotes that I liked and saved while reading The World According to Garp book by John Irving. I hope you will like them too.
By the way, I am Deepak Kundu, an avid book reader, quotes collector and blogger.
The World According to Garp Quotes
- 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. If you don’t fit either category, then everyone tries to make you think there is something wrong with you.
- A part of adolescence is feeling that there’s no one else around who’s enough like yourself to understand you.
- 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.
- I was trained to be a nurse. Nursing was the first thing I took to, and the first thing I ever wanted to do. It simply seemed very practical, to me, for someone who was healthy – and I have always been healthy – to help people who weren’t healthy or who couldn’t help themselves.
- There is no smell like sex. You cannot disguise it. It is as rich and clear as spilled beer.
- You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
- If you are careful, 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.
- One’s children certainly have a right to catch one in the middle of something – they usually do.
- Wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn’t reading.
- 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.
- The police are always more interested in bothering the person who reports the crime than they are interested in bothering the criminals.
- In modern times, in my opinion, either everything is a moral question or there are no more moral questions. Nowadays, there are no compromises or there are only compromises.
- 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.
- Since the art of the writing doesn’t always make the writer’s seriousness apparent, it’s sometimes necessary to reveal the depth of one’s personal anguish by other means. Killing yourself seems to mean that you were serious after all. It’s true. And thereafter, much seriousness is suddenly revealed in the work – where it had escaped notice before.
- One way for novels to be successful is for the fiction to resemble somebody’s version of the news.
- Death, it seems, does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic.
- Even if there is only death after death (after death), be grateful for small favors – sometimes there is birth after sex, for example. And, if you are very fortunate, sometimes there is sex after birth!
- A novel was only a place for storage – of all the meaningful things that a novelist isn’t able to use in his life.
- Life, is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead, an ending occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that’s left is memory.
- I have always known that the pursuit of excellence is a lethal habit.
- Between men and women, only death is shared equally.