The World According To Garp Quotes

They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.

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

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

Imagining something is better than remembering something.

You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.

All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.

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

If you are careful,' Garp wrote, 'if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day; what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane.

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.

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.

Oh FUCK the longings and agonies of youth.

Everybody dies … The thing is, to have a life before we die.

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.

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.

In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.

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.

The history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories.

but writers, Garp knew, were just observers - good and ruthless imitators of human behavior.

There are always suicides," Garp wrote, "among people who are unable to say what they mean".

Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax..

You're nice,' Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. 'And you're my oldest friend.' But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends.

It is an important distinction to note that she looked not only as if she had taken good care of herself, but that she had good reason to have done so. (...) She looked to be in such total possession of her life that only the most confident men could continue to look at her if she looked back at them. Even in bus stations, she was a woman who was stared at only until she looked back.

Bonkie bit Garp!" Garp bit Bonkie

In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?

A novelist is a doctor who sees only terminal cases.

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

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.

He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson

don't worry - so what if there is no life after death? There is life after Garp, believe me.

She felt detached from her family, and thought it strange how they had lavished so much attention on her, as a child, and then at some appointed, prearranged time they seemed to stop the flow of affection and being the expectations - as if, for a brief phrase, you were expected to absorb love (and get enough), and then, for a much longer and more serious phase, you were expected to fulfill certain obligations.

Jenny Fields felt undone, the way only a person who has been careful can feel when confronted by a mistake.

a part of adolescence is feeling that there's no one else around who's enough like yourself to understand you.

Of course, apologies are rarely acceptable to true believers - or to anyone who believes in *pure* good, or in pure evil.

Garp discovered that when you are writing something, everything seems related to everything else.

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.

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)

As for Jenny, she felt only that women - just like men - should at least be able to make conscious decisions about the course of their lives; if that made her a feminist, she said, then she guessed she was one.

...nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.

His resolve was blown as quickly as the rest of him.

...the demands of writing and of real life are not always similar.

He felt fortunate to be with Helen; she had her own ambitions and he could not manipulate here.

Jenny Fields discovered that you got more respect from shocking other people than you got from trying to live your own life with a little privacy.

A book feels true when it feels true," she said to him, impatiently. "A book's true when you can say, 'Yeah! That's just how damn people behave all the time.

De alguna manera -había argumentado Garp- la vida es demasiado. La vida es un folletín melodramático no apto para menores, John

in the hospital, Jenny Fields felt she was making up for lost time; she was discovering that people weren't much more mysterious, or much more attractive, than clams.

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.

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.

My mother and I smoked a cigarette; she was trying to quit as I was trying to start. Therefore, we shared a cigarette between us- in fact, we’d promised never to smoke a whole one alone.

No matter what my fucking last words were, please say they were these: 'I have always known that the pursuit of excellence is a lethal habit.

Garp didn't want a daughter because of men. Because of bad men, certainly; but even, he thought, because of men like me.

Meaning Michael Milton; meaning the whole thing.

Fucking men.

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.

Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day: what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love.

Unlike Alice, Garp was a real writer —not because he wrote more beautifully than she wrote but because he knew what every artist should know: 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. Garp did not write faster than anyone else, or more; he simply always worked with the idea of completion in mind.

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.

Vielleicht muss es im Leben eines Schriftstellers diesen Augenblick geben, in dem ein anderer Schriftsteller beschuldigt wird, seinen Beruf verfehlt zu haben.

If Garp was going to play lacrosse, Jenny thought, where would he go? Not out, because it’s dark; he’d lose the ball.

The only reason for something to happen in a novel is that it’s the perfect thing to have happen at that time.

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?

They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other. That

Hago lo que quiero - afirmó Garp -. No le pongas otro nombre. Sólo hago lo que me da la gana... y eso es precisamente lo que hizo mi madre toda su vida, o sea lo que quería hacer.

...energy begets energy.

With women, Ernie Holm had some experience at taking no for an answer.

You'd better leave your chromosomes at the door.

In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases." John Irving's The World According to Garp

Jenny felt that her education was merely a polite way to bide time, as if she were really a cow, being prepared only for the insertion of the device for artificial insemination. Her

Technical Sergeant Garp, the late gunner whose familiarity with violent death cannot be exaggerated, served with the Eighth Air Force – the air force that bombed the Continent from England.

But Vienna was in its death phase; it lay still and let me look at it, and think about it, and look again. In a living city, I could never have noticed so much. Living cities don't hold still.

Wizened and white, with brown blotched on her face the size and complexity of unshelled peanuts, Midge had a jitter in her head that made her pew like a chicken trying to make up its mind what to peck.

Quería trabajar y vivir sola. Eso me convirtió en sexualmente sospechosa. Después deseé tener un hijo sin que para ello tuviera que compartir mi cuerpo ni mi vida. También eso me convirtió en sexualmente sospechosa.

The World According to Bensenhaver,” the book jacket flap said, “is about a man who is so fearful of bad things happening to his loved ones that he creates an atmosphere of such tension that bad things are almost certain to occur. And they do.

Helen Holm había pasado toda su vida en tardes de tres horas sentada en las salas de lucha, desde Iowa hasta Steering, observando a muchachos de diversa complexión, sudorosos y entrelazados. Helen señalaría, años más tarde, que el hecho de haber pasado su infancia en una sala de lucha libre la había convertido en una lectora. “Nací para ser espectadora”, decía Helen. “Me crié para ser voyeur.

Most of you know who I am," he whispered. Duncan was sleep, but Helen overheard him; she reached across the aisle and held Garp's hand. Thousands of feet above sea level, T. S. Garp cried in the airplane that was bringing him home to be famous in his violent country.

Importantly, it was in this out north to Steering, with the real Ellen James sleep and in his care, that T. S. Garp decided he would try to be more like his mother, Jenny Fields. A thought, it occurred to him, that would have pleased his mother greatly if it had only come to him when she was alive.

She felt if she ever had children she would love them no less when they were twenty than when they were two; they might need you more at twenty, she thought. What do you really need when you're two? In the hospital, the babies were the easiest patients. The older they got, the more they needed; and the less anyone wanted or loved them.

At first it had slashed up the little silk pockets of her purse. Then she found part of an old thermometer container that slipped over the head of the scalpel, capping it like a fountain pen. It was this cap she removed when the soldier moved into the seat beside her and stretched his arm along the armrest they were (absurdly) meant to share.

– with his own very male instincts, which were otherwise

No matter what my fucking last words were, please say they were these: ‘I have always known that the pursuit of excellence is a lethal habit.

She told all the would-be biographers, exactly as he would have, “Read the work. Forget the life.

The destruction of art by sociology and psychoanalysis,” he called it.

If you are lucky enough to find a way of life that you love, you have to find the courage to live it.

In this dirty-minded world,” Jenny wrote, “you are either somebody’s wife or somebody’s whore—or fast on your way to becoming one or the other.

Vienna, Garp thought, was a cadaver; all Europe, maybe, was a dressed-up corpse in an open coffin.

He had just one vowel and one consonant left.

What do they expect of a one-eyed, one-armed artist-- and the son of Garp? No flaws?

Jenny decided that all manifestations of her innocence were futile and appeared defensive.

before

THE TELEPHONE, THAT old cry of alarm—a warrior stabbed on guard duty, screaming his shock—startled the pension where they lived and brought the trembling landlady like a ghost to their rooms.

Escribió que la peor razón para que algo ocurriera en una novela era que hubiera ocurrido realmente. “¡Todo ha ocurrido realmente, alguna vez!”, rabiaba. “La única razón para que algo ocurra es que es perfecto que ocurra en ese momento”. -Dime cualquier cosa que te haya ocurrido a ti- dijo en cierta ocasión a una entrevistadora- y yo lo mejoraré. Puedo mostrar los detalles mejor que como ocurrieron.

A lecture on what’s universal by a woman who’s never once felt sexual desire. And the Pope, who takes vows of chastity, decides the issue of contraception for millions. The world is crazy!’ Garp cried.

First chapter ain't so bad," Jillsy said. "That first chapter ain't nothin'. It's that nineteenth chapter that got me, "Jillsy said. "Lawd, Lawd!" she crowed. "You read nineteen chapters?" John Wolf asked. "You didn't give me no more than nineteen chapters," Jillsy said. "Jesus Lawd, is there another chapter? Do they keep goin' on?" "No, no," John Wolf said. "that's the end of it. That's all there is.

the history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness, and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever;

A frail mutter reached Garp from the mourners at Fat Stew's funeral, aghast at the apparently unmovable casket. But Garp believed in himself. It was just death in there; of course it would be heavy - the weight of his mother, Jenny Fields, the weight of Ernie Holm, and of little Walt (who was the heaviest of all). God knows what they all weighed together, but Garp planted himself on one side of Fat Stew's gray gunboat of a coffin. He was ready.

Assassination, in Wolf’s opinion, was “an increasingly popular amateur sport of the times”; and “political true believers,” as he called nearly everybody, were always the sworn enemy of the artist—who insisted, however arrogantly, on the superiority of a personal vision.

Y naturalmente, para ser justos, lo mejor de las ellenjamesianas había consistido en dar a conocer el pavor general que tan brutalmente amenazaba a mujeres y niñas. Para muchas ellenjamesianas, la imitación del horrible deslenguamiento no había sido "enteramente político". Había sido una identificación muy personal. Por supuesto, en algunos casos las ellenjamesianas eran mujeres que también habían sido violadas y lo que querían decir era que se sentían como si les faltara la lengua. En un mundo de hombres, sentían que las habían reducido al silencio para siempre.

He wrote Helen that a young writer needs desperately to live with someone and he had decided that he wanted to live with her; even marry her, he offered, because sex was simply necessary but it took too much of one's time if one had to be constantly planning how one was going to get it. Therefore, Garp reasoned, it is better to live with it! Helen revised several letters before she finally sent him one that said he could, so to speak, go stick it in his ear. Did he think she was going through college so rigorously so that she could provide him with sex that was not even necessary to plan?

It's all right, Duncan, believe me," he whispered, incomprehensibly. "you're going to be all right." He wiped the blood from the boy's throat wit his hand; nothing at the boy's throat was cut, he could see. He wiped the blood from the boy's temples, and saw that they were not bashed in. He kicked open the driver's side door, to be sure; the door light went on and he could see that one of Duncan's eyes was darting. The eye was looking fr help, but Garp could see that the eye could see. He wiped more blood with his hand, but he could not find Duncan's other eye. "It's okay," he whispered to Duncan, but Duncan screamed even louder.

The temptation to touch each other, even to bash their shopping carts together, was removed from them, and they all settled into being the kind of friends many old friends become: that is, they were friends when they heard from each other – or when, occasionally, they got together. And when they were not in touch, they did not think of one another.

I ordered Pad See Ew from the Thai place, ate half of it, watched the 1995 remake of Sabrina starring Harrison Ford, took another shower, downed the last of my Ambien, and found the porn channel again. I turned the volume down low, shifted my body away from the screen so that the grunts and moans could lull me. Still, I didn’t sleep. Life could go on forever like this, I thought. Life would, if I didn’t take action. I fingered myself on the sofa under the blanket, came twice, then turned the TV off. I got up and raised the blinds and sat in a daze for a while and watched the sun go down—was it possible?—then I rewound Sabrina and watched it again and ate the rest of the Pad See Ew. I watched Driving Miss Daisy and Sling Blade. I took a Nembutal and drank half a bottle of Robitussin. I watched The World According to Garp and Stargate and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and Moonstruck and Flashdance, then Dirty Dancing and Ghost, then Pretty Woman.