A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
John IrvingRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Time changes our relationships, often leaving those who were once important to us overlooked or forgotten.
John Irving's quote reflects on the inevitable passage of time and its impact on our relationships. As we grow and change, some people who once played significant roles in our lives may fade into the background, becoming mere memories rather than active figures in our present. This poignant observation highlights the bittersweet nature of relationships and the fundamental changes that occur as we navigate through life's various phases.
Themes
TimeRelationshipsChangeMemoriesAcceptance
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be shared during a speech about the importance of cherishing relationships as time passes.
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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.
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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.
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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 β toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings.
John IrvingRead
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