World According To Garp Quotes & Sayings

In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases — John Irving

I always thought I should be treated like a star. — Madonna

She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything
maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all. — John Irving

While devastation created by nature, such as wildfire, tornadoes, and hurricanes, can be far reaching and cause cataclysmic losses, the trauma that haunts our dreams and is the most feared is man-made. Acts of violence and depravity committed by one human being on another are personal in nature and leave those affected by them asking the questions, "Why did it happen to me?" or "Why did it have to happen at all?" With the advent of technology, the general public can view a new atrocity every day on the nightly news somewhere close to their community. — Karen Rodwill Solomon

As a child, my mother told me not to talk to strangers. I did my best to obey. She hadn't realized that everyone is a stranger to the part of us that makes us who we truly are. The part of us that prays for the rest in ways we cannot comprehend. In a sense, we are our own monsters, lying in wait under our own beds
our own angels and demons.
The lives we lead will judge us. This is as natural as the sun rising and setting, something that happens whether or not we're alive. — Christopher Hawke

Now, I've always known that there were bullies in the world. We've seen a lot of it in politics lately as well as in daily life. You see it where people who may be stronger, or bigger, or better with verbiage than other folks ... show off. To me, that's what bullying is, showing off. It's saying, I'm better than you, I can take you down. Not just physically, but emotionally. — Whoopi Goldberg

[Our self-image is] that gap between intention and effect — Diane Arbus

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry. — Paul Muldoon

I won't be satisfied until I've put the entire security industry out of work. — Daniel J. Bernstein

Lovers meander in prose and rhyme,
trying to say-
for the thousandth time-
what's easier done than said. — Piet Hein

The space between Heaven and Earth
is it not like a bellows? — Lao-Tzu

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

Celebration when your plan is working? Anyone can do that. But when you realize that the story of your life could be told a thousand different ways, that you could tell it over and over as a tragedy, but you choose to call it an epic, that's when you start to learn what celebration is. When what you see in front of you is so far outside of what you dreamed, but you have the belief, the boldness, the courage to call it beautiful instead of calling it wrong, that's celebration. — Shauna Niequist

I didn't feel the need for anonymous affection, for people in the dark applauding. To me, it would be like writing a novel and then getting up every night and reading your novel. — Tom Lehrer

I love making genre films. It's something I've really been attracted to since I was a kid, mostly because, as a kid, it was forbidden fruit. — Patrick Lussier

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

I read John Irving's novel 'The World According To Garp' when I was about 14 or 15. It was the first grown-up book that I had read. It is the story of a young man who grows up to be a novelist. I finished it, and I wanted to write a book that made the reader feel the way I felt at the end of that, which was sort of both bereft and elated. — Glen Duncan

Doing interesting things and then writing about them is the best way to become a good writer. — Jean Craighead George

You're looking for sexual tidbits as a female child, and the only ones that present themselves depict child rape or other violations (all my favorite books in my preteen years: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Clan of the Cave Bear, The World According to Garp, as well as the few R-rated movies I was allowed to see - Fame, most notably, with its indelible scene of Irene Cara being asked to take her shirt off and suck her thumb by a skeezy photographer who promises to make her a star), then your sexuality will form around that fact. There is no control group. I don't even want to talk about "female sexuality" until there is a control group. And there never will be. — Maggie Nelson

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

Nature and society are so replete with startling contrasts that wit often consists in the mere statement and comparison of facts, as when Hume says that the ancient Muscovites wedded their wives with a whip instead of a ring. — Edwin Percy Whipple

I swallowed. "Mum, you're not going to get divorced, are you?" Her eyes shot open. "Divorced? I'm a good Catholic girl, Louisa. We don't divorce. We just make our men suffer for all eternity." She waited just for a moment, and then she started to laugh. — Jojo Moyes