I have digressed, which is also the kind of writer I would become.
I can’t read Tess of the d’Urbervilles! I cried. It’s too hard! YOU MEAN IT’S HARD TO MAKE YOURSELF READ IT, YOU MEAN IT’S HARD TO MAKE YOURSELF PAY ATTENTION, he said. BUT IT’S NOT TESS OF THE D’URBE...
Homer Wells was in Wally’s room, reading David Copperfield and thinking about Heaven – ‘…that sky above me, where, in the mystery to come, I might yet love her with a love unknown on earth, and tell h...
His exposure to storytelling, through Charles Dickens and Charlotte Bronte, had ill prepared him for characters who came from and traveled nowhere -- or for stories that made no sense.
He’d complained to his doctor. The beta-blockers are blocking my memories! Juan Diego cried. They are stealing my childhood—they are robbing my dreams! To his doctor, all this hysteria meant was that...
Here come the characters who comprise the movie vermin, the Hollywood scum, the film slime—the aforementioned unscrupulous cowards of mediocrity. Fortunately, they are minor characters, yet so distast...
He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.
He also knew that rivals are best unmanned by being ignored.
Hago lo que quiero - afirmó Garp -. No le pongas otro nombre. Sólo hago lo que me da la gana... y eso es precisamente lo que hizo mi madre toda su vida, o sea lo que quería hacer.
Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.
Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax..
Further along is fairly specific compared to other New Hampshire forms of directions; we don’t enjoy giving directions in New Hampshire—we tend to think that if you don’t know where you’re going, you...
Dr. Larch bent over him and kissed him, very lightly, on his lips. Homer heard Dr. Larch whisper, ‘Good work, Homer.’ He felt a second, even lighter kiss. ‘Good work, my boy,’ the doctor said, and the...
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.
Dan suggested to Owen and me that we were better off to not involve ourselves with Hester. How true! But how we wanted to be involved in the thrilling real-life sleaziness that we suspected Hester was...
Casey recalled how Gail defended herself in the parking lot of the English & Philosophy Building from the unwanted attentions of a lecherous fellow student, who shall remain nameless. ‘Please leave me...
Candy felt helpless; no one seemed to understand why she was standing there. Children were colliding with her at hip level, and this awkward, darkly handsome young man, who was surely her own age but...
But miracles don’t c-c-c-cause belief—real miracles don’t m-m-m-make faith out of thin air; you have to already have faith in order to believe in real miracles.
Both,’ Garp wrote, ‘were of the opinion that the practice of law was vulgar, but the study of it was sublime.’ They
Bonkie bit Garp!Garp bit Bonkie