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What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Love
Mattered
People
Passage
Passages
Hardest
Accept
Accepting
Wind
Time
Parentheses

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My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me—don’t make me a category before you get to know me!
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Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can't even remember having met you
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In this world,” Franny once observed, “just as you’re trying to think of yourself as memorable, there is always someone who forgets that that they have met you.
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You think you have a memory but it has you!
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Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.
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So, I don't work in terms of real time. I don't work in a timely fashion.
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Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
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The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.
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You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.
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You can learn a lot from your lovers, but-for the most part-you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them.
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It's a no-win argument - that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.
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A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.
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My life is a reading list.
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I don’t have to say to you or anyone in our WRESTLING community that we are a small world unto ourselves and there is often a big difference in how much we love and understand each other and how little we’re understood or appreciated by people who spend their weekends watching basketball.
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It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.
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I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.
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You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed.
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When writing a novel, I'm not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don't know what it is.
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