Top 36 Garp Quotes
#1. What do they expect of a one-eyed, one-armed artist-- and the son of Garp? No flaws?
John Irving
#2. There are always suicides," Garp wrote, "among people who are unable to say what they mean".
John Irving
#3. Life," Garp wrote, "is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead an end occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that is left is memory. But even a nihilist has memory.
John Irving
#4. When (The World According To) Garp was published, people who'd lost children wrote to me. 'I lost one, too,' they told me. I confessed to them that I hadn't lost any children. I'm just a father with a good imagination. In my imagination, I lose my children every day. (afterword)
John Irving
#5. In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases
John Irving
#6. A brief short story may require only a few paragraphs after the climax. On the other hand, in his massive novel 'The World According to Garp,' John Irving's denouement consisted of 10 separate sections, each devoted to an individual character's fate and each almost a story in itself.
Nancy Kress
#7. Both,' Garp wrote, 'were of the opinion that the practice of law was vulgar, but the study of it was sublime.' They
John Irving
#8. Don't worry - so what if there is no life after death? There is life after Garp, believe me.
John Irving
#9. Garp didn't want a daughter because of men. Because of bad men, certainly; but even, he thought, because of men like me.
John Irving
#10. If Garp was going to play lacrosse, Jenny thought, where would he go? Not out, because it's dark; he'd lose the ball.
John Irving
#11. Crazy people made him crazy. It was as if he personally resented them giving into madness - in part, because he so frequently labored to behave sanely. When some people gave up the labor of sanity, or failed at it, Garp suspected them of not trying hard enough.
John Irving
#12. Garp was a natural storyteller; he could make things up, one right after the other, and they seemed to fit. But what did they mean?
John Irving
#13. But writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
John Irving
#14. A novel I read when I was about 17 or 18 - 'The World According to Garp,' by John Irving - really made me want to become a writer. The character of Garp is a novelist, and at the time, the whole lifestyle of being a writer was hugely appealing to me.
John Niven
#15. Remember," Duncan asked on the plane, "how Walt asked if it was green or brown?"
Both Garp and Duncan laughed. But it was neither green nor brown, Garp thought. It was me. It was Helen. It was the color of bad weather. It was the size of an automobile.
John Irving
#16. Garp discovered that when you are writing something, everything seems related to everything else.
John Irving
#17. As Garp put it, 'You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.' Even if these so-called endings and beginnings are illusions.
John Irving
#18. Well, you finally got me, Helen had whispered to him, tearfully, but Garp had sprawled there, on his back on the wrestling mat, wondering who had gotten whom.
John Irving
#20. Stewart, Jr. who was called Stewie Two, graduated from Steering before Garp was even of age to enter the school; Jenny treated Stewie Two twice for a sprained ankle and once for gonorrhea. He later went through Harvard Business School, a staph infection, and a divorce.
John Irving
#21. Death, it seems," Garp wrote, "does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic.
John Irving
#22. Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax..
John Irving
#23. The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land.
Abraham Lincoln
#24. I happen to be kind of an inquisitive guy and when I see things I don't like, I start thinking, why do they have to be like this and how can I improve them?
Walt Disney
#25. She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything
maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.
John Irving
#27. When I was 19 years old, I came down with anorexia. I had it for about a year before it became public. And it had a lot to do with my self-esteem.
Tracey Gold
#28. It's amazing what they can do with animation nowadays. It's really beautiful. The 3D stuff is out of hand.
Peter Dinklage
#29. I wish our brains could 'hunger', like our tummies do
Ela Crain
#30. If a woman has a good ass the rest of her wil be nicely configured too, except for maybe the face. The face is always on its own.
James Carlos Blake
#31. We've learned that we've allowed technological capabilities to dictate policies and practices, rather than ensuring that our laws and values guide our technological capabilities.
Edward Snowden
#32. Jace and I had been like that, two towers, soaring through the sky side by side, looking and feeling indestructible while we were together.
Natalie Valdes
#33. Yet God is so one that He admits of distinction, and so admits of distinction that He still remains unity.
John Hales
#34. Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness.
Harold Bloom
#35. You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
Fables for Our Time, Moral of "The Owl Who Was God" (1940)
James Thurber
#36. The best way to describe your total creative capacity is to say that for all practical purposes it is infinite.
George Leonard
