Quote

Lilly was not crazy. She left a serious suicide note. 'Sorry,' said the note. 'Just not big enough.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Serious
Crazy
Bigs
Lilly
Left
Note
Enough
Suicide
Notes
Sorry

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If you asked me one day, I might say, Well, sometimes I feel a little bit religious. If you asked me another day, I'd just say flat out, No.
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He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
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I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn't terribly painful.
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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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A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.
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I think that was when the headmaster realized he had lost he realized then that he was finished. Because, what could he do? Was he going to tell us to stop praying? We kept our heads bowed and we kept praying. Even as awkward as he was, the Rev. Mr. Merrill had made it clear to us that there was no end to praying for Owen Meany.
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If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?
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Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
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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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There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.
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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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I don't want you to describe to me—not ever—what you were doing to that poor boy to make him sound like that but if you ever do it again, please cover his mouth with your hand.
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I still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.
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And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.
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Half my life is an act of revision.
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Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.
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The excitement of anticipation was *almost* equal to the thrill of lovemaking.
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Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.
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In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?
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He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.
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