He was one of those people things came easily to, but he did little to demonstrate that he deserved to be gifted.

It's a no-win argument - that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.

but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.

It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound.

He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson

Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.

In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.