A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
John IrvingRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects on the complexities of nature versus nurture in human development, arguing that reducing it to a simple debate is unproductive.
John Irving suggests that the debate between nature (what we are born with) and nurture (how our environment shapes us) is not only inconclusive but also tedious. He emphasizes that both aspects are deeply intertwined and contribute to the complexities of human existence, and thus oversimplifying this relationship undermines the richness of our understanding of life and personal growth.
Themes
NatureNurtureGrowthComplexityPhilosophy
In practice
Example use cases
This quote would be great to include in a discussion about child development in psychology class.
More from John Irving
All quotes βNo 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.
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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.
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 β toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings.
John IrvingRead
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