Quote

Ever since the Christmas of 1953, I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection the so-called spirit of giving can be as greedy as receiving-Christmas is our time to be aware of what we lack, of who's not home.

John Irving

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John Irving
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 2
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Exeter
New Hampshire
John Winslow Irving
Giving
Special
Receiving
Time
Called
Admit
Since
Christmas
Felt
Families
Spirit
Lack
Home
Aware
Greedy
Ever
Loss
Imperfection
Must
Hell
Suffered

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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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I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
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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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And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.
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Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents' own rule.
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Your memory is a monster you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory but it has you!
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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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Don't forget this, too: Rumors aren't interested in the unsensational story rumors don't care what's true.
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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've always been slow but I'm even slower now. I'm more into the waiting, or I guess I'm more patient about the waiting.
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I don't begin a novel until I have written, not just the last sentence, but usually, as a result thereof, many of the surrounding final paragraphs, so that in addition to knowing what happens, I know what the voice is.
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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.
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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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You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
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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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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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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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My life is a reading list.
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Safer than we are.” I told Franny. “Safer than love.” “let me tell ya kid,” Franny said to me, squeezing my hand. “Everything’s safer than love.
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If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?
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