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

I've always been interested in miracles, or the miraculous of the unexplained. I don't scoff at what makes people believe or want to believe. I think I understand the tremendous attraction of the mysteries of the church to the same degree that I understand and appreciate the frustration people feel, especially believers, with the human rule-making arm of the church, with the not-miraculous part of the church - any church.

What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too.

And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.

It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.

The history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness and even affection, but 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.

Life," Garp wrote, "is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead an end occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that is left is memory. But even a nihilist has memory.