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It is amazing to me, now, how such wild imaginings and philosophies - inspired by a night charged with frights and calamities - made such perfectly good sense to Owen Meany and me, but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Philosophy
Fright
Friends
Charged
Sense
Calamity
Night
Supportive
Nothing
Perfectly
Imaginings
Made
Wild
Owen
Good
Inspired
Calamities
Amazing
Philosophies

More quotes by John Irving

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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
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People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.
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I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
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Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
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This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
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They all settled into being the kind of friends when they heard from each other.... or when they occasionally got together. And when they were not in touch, they did not think of one another.
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If I had to be anything, he told her, I'd probably be a socialist, but I don't want to be anything.
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The characters in my novels, from the very first one, are always on some quixotic effort of attempting to control something that is uncontrollable - some element of the world that is essentially random and out of control.
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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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Rituals are comforting rituals combat loneliness.
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If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
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My old coach used to say that if you were in it for the match, if you were in it for the trophies, you were in it for the wrong reasons.
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Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else's religion practiced on us.
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Patriotism is not necessarily defined as blind devotion to a president's particular agenda - and that to dispute a presidential policy is not necessarily anti-American.
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… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.
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I still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.
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You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
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Our memory is a monster you forget it - it does not.
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The first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life led by human beings the second was that human beings could survive a life in hotels.
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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