If you care about something you have to protect it – If you’re lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.
You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.
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.
My life is a reading list.
Keep passing the open windows.
They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.
We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.
It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
In this dirty minded world, you are either someone's wife or someone's whore. And if you're not either people think there is something wrong with you....but there is nothing wrong with me
Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.
Never confuse faith, or belief—of any kind—with something even remotely intellectual.
The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.
In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us -- not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.
People only ask questions when they're ready to hear the answers.
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.
Imagining something is better than remembering something.
It's not god who's fucked up, it's the screamers who say they believe in him and who claim to pursue their ends in his holy name.
In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases
A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy
It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don't expect me to change.
Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean––make sure they know what they mean!
When time passes, it's the people who knew you whom you want to see; they're the ones you can talk to. When enough time passes, what's it matter what they did to you?
You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.
…the consequences of sex are often more memorable than the act itself.
Life is serious but art is fun!
… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.
Logic is relative.
All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.
Half my life is an act of revision.
All his life he would hold this moment as exemplary of what love was. It was not wanting anything more, nor was it expecting people to exceed what they had just accomplished; it was simply feeling so complete.
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
I’m not afraid, but I’m very nervous.
Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.
You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
The more clearly one sees this world; the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.
If you don't feel that you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then probably what you are doing isn't very vital.
Being afraid you'll look like a coward is the worst reason for doing anything.
Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can't even remember having met you
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.
…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.
Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.
Sorrow floats.
When however small a measure of jealousy is mixed with misunderstanding, there is always going to be trouble.
How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.
We will often do anything to pretend that nothing is on our minds.
He also knew that rivals are best unmanned by being ignored.
Oh FUCK the longings and agonies of youth.
I have learned that the consequences of our past actions are always interesting; I have learned to view the present with a forward-looking eye.
We are formed by what we desire
O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
Wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.
It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound.
If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?
Good habits are worth being fanatical about.
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.
When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother's hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
Don't forget this, too: Rumors aren't interested in the unsensational story; rumors don't care what's true.
In this dirty minded world, you are either someone's wife or someone's whore.
Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.
If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough.
In this dirty-minded world you are either somebody's wife or somebody's whore, or fast on your way to becoming one or the other.
The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child.
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.
A woman half dressed seemed to have some power, but a man was simply not as handsome as when he was naked, and not as secure as when he was clothed.
If we live long enough, we become caricatures of ourselves.
This is a writer’s lesson: To learn that the sounds that we imagine can be the clearest, loudest sounds of all.
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.
Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.
This was not of the nature of a Christlike lesson for Owen Meany to learn, as he lay in the manger, that someone you hate can give you a hard-on.
Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
…there is no straightforward negotiation with a four year old…
As it was, things went from bad to worse, as they often will when amateurs are involved in an activity that they perform in bad temper – or in a hurry.
You can't learn everything you need to know legally.
…there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.
It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.
 is a game with a lot of waiting in it; it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action )
(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it; it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action
Don’t you understand?” he would say, “You imagine the story better than I remember it.
Lilly was not crazy. She left a serious suicide note. 'Sorry,' said the note. 'Just not big enough.
Just because you're sober, don't think you're a good driver, Cookie.
. . .There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments . . .
Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer's irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.
You cannot drive with your eyes in the rear-view mirror… But dignity is difficult to maintain. Stamina requires constant upkeep. Repetition is boring. And you pay for grace.
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.
If I had to be anything," he told her, "I'd probably be a socialist, but I don't want to be anything.
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.
Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.
The lie, of course, is more interesting.
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.
Being wrong about important things is exhausting.
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.
But writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.
Being reviewed is being condescended to by your inferiors.
I think about you more and more, but I don't waste my time - or yours - thinking about who you were before I knew you.
The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.
If pride is a sin ... moral pride is the greatest sin.
The gardener had a dread of small women; he'd always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.
Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax..
Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.
My brain is sending poison to my heart.
Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents' own rule.
