The Cider House Rules

by John Irving

The fear in that family was fixed in St. Larch’s vision; no one, he believed, who had seen such fear should ever make a woman have a baby she didn’t want to have. “NO ONE!” Dr. Larch wrote in his journal. “Not even someone from the Ramses Paper Company!”

And it is not a problem that every woman who gets pregnant doesn’t necessarily want her baby; perhaps we can look ahead to a more enlightened time, when women will have the right to abort the birth of an unwanted child—but some women will always be uneducated, will always be confused, will always be frightened. Even in enlightened times, unwanted babies will manage to be born.

Sometimes, when we are labeled, when we are branded, our brand becomes our calling;

chance. It is my experience that practically everything is left up to chance much of the time; men who believe in good and evil, and who believe that good should win, should watch for those moments when it is possible to play God—we should seize those moments. There won’t be many.

There are things that the societies of towns know about you, and things that they miss.

“History,” wrote Dr. Larch, “is composed of the smallest, often undetected mistakes.”

When you lie, you feel as if you have cheated fate—your own, and everybody else’s.”

“A chance is all we get, right? In the air, or underwater, or right here, from the minute we’re born.” Or from the minute we’re not born, he thought;

After all, there was much evidence—in both the products of conception, and their attendant pain, and in the injured lives of many of Dr. Larch’s orphans—to justify his view that there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.

“Dread remorse when you are tempted to err, Miss Eyre: remorse is the poison of life.”

When time passes, it’s the people who knew you whom you want to see; they’re the ones you can talk to. When enough time passes, what’s it matter what they did to you?

What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us are wrapped up in parentheses.