A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
John IrvingRead
… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Accepting emotional pain as a part of life is a common human experience.
In this quote, John Irving reflects on the idea that experiencing emotional pain is a natural part of living. The reference to Dr. Larch suggests that this ache is not only typical but also something one must learn to accept as part of the human condition, emphasizing the idea that suffering is often intertwined with the joy of living.
Themes
PainLifeAcceptanceSufferingHuman Experience
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about resilience, this quote can serve to illustrate how to cope with life's challenges.
More from John Irving
All quotes →No one but me ever put a hand on me to feel that baby. No one wanted to put his ear against it and listen...You shouldn't have a baby if there's no one who wants to feel it kick or listen to it move.
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It's not very interesting to establish sympathy for people who, on the surface, are instantly sympathetic. I guess I'm always attracted to people who, if their lives were headlines in a newspaper, you might not be very sympathetic about them.
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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.
John IrvingRead
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.
John IrvingRead
I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes – toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings.
John IrvingRead
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