The World According to Garp

by John Irving

In this dirty-minded world, she thought, you are either somebody’s wife or somebody’s whore – or fast on your way to becoming one or the other. If you don’t fit either category, then everyone tries to make you think there is something wrong with you. But, she thought, there is nothing wrong with me.

‘You have a nice body,’ Cushie Percy whispered to Garp, and he squeezed her hand back. ‘So do you,’ he told her, honestly. She had, in fact, an absurd body. Small but wholly bloomed, a compact blossom.

‘his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his sense a dim rushlight, his body a prey of worms, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, his fame doubtful. In short, all that is body is as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapors.’

‘In this dirty-minded world,’ Jenny wrote, ‘you are either somebody’s wife or somebody’s whore – or fast on your way to becoming one or the other.’

death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories.

Many couples live together and discover they’re not in love; some couples never discover it. Others marry, and the news comes to them at awkward moments in their lives.

‘You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.’

Horace Walpole once said that the world is comic to those who think and tragic to those who feel.

‘Death, it seems,’ Garp wrote, ‘does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic.’

‘Imagining something is better than remembering something,’

‘Between men and women,’ as Jenny Fields once said, ‘only death is shared equally.’ Jenny Garp, who in the field of death had much more specific training than her famous grandmother, would not have agreed. Young Jenny knew that, between men and women, not even death gets shared equally. Men get to die more, too.

trying to keep everyone alive, forever. Even the ones who must die in the end. They’re the most important to keep alive’).