Quote

Owen Meany believed that “coincidence” was a stupid, shallow refuge sought by stupid, shallow people who were unable to accept the fact that their lives were shaped by a terrifying and awesome design – more powerful and unstoppable than the Yankee Flyer. (a train)

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
People
Accept
Coincidence
Flyer
Design
Sought
Flyers
Accepting
Awesome
Owen
Stupid
Shallow
Yankee
Powerful
Unable
Unstoppable
Fact
Refuge
Yankees
Lives
Believed
Terrifying
Facts
Train
Shaped

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Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.
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You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
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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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Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyÕre going someplace.
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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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I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.
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Thus we try to keep our heroes alive hence we remember them.
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Sell my old clothes - I'm off to heaven
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She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.
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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.
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Imagining something is better than remembering something.
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Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!
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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.
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Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.
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Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.
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Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.
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I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.
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Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.
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. . .There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments . . .
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I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you're going to be in this business, if you're going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin.
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