A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
John IrvingRead
We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.
Interpretation
Sometimes, stepping back allows us to better understand what truly matters to us.
This quote by John Irving suggests that losing focus on our immediate priorities can provide us with a clearer perspective on what is genuinely important. By detaching ourselves from our daily distractions and obligations, we create space for deeper reflection, enabling us to realign our actions with our core values and aspirations.
In practice
In a team meeting, to emphasize the importance of reevaluating our goals.
A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
Though I can't change what happened, I can choose how to react. And I don't want to spend the rest of my life being bitter and locked up.
A man who gets the reputation of rising at dawn can sleep to noon.
Bad conduct soils the finest ornament more than filth.
The best among our writers are doing their accustomed work of mirroring what is deep in the spirit of our time; if chaos appears in those mirrors, we must have faith that in the future, as always in the past, that chaos will slowly reveal itself as a new aspect of order.
There is happiness in the love of labor, there is misery in the love of gain.
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