The World According to Garp

by John Irving

The older they got, the more they needed; and the less anyone wanted or loved them.

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 only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.” Even if these so-called endings and beginnings are illusions.

It was Garp’s curse to be unable to conceal his feelings from people, even from strangers; if he thought contemptuous thoughts about you, somehow you knew.

Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer’s irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn’t reading.

in utter rumplement upon the water bed.

A thought, it occurred to him, that would have pleased his mother greatly if it had only come to him when she was alive.

but his deep restlessness and unrelieved pessimism could only be numbed and disguised by smoking three packs of unfiltered cigarettes per day from the time he was eighteen.