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"No one but me ever put a hand on me to feel that baby. No one wanted to put his ear against it and listen...You shouldn't have a baby if there's no one who wants to feel it kick or listen to it move."
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"One of the nicest things you can do to kick-start your children's day is to tell them honestly they look nice as they head out the door. This easy, five-second exchange says to your child: 'I see you; I notice you; I love you.'"

"Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand that your own parents had a full and intricate existence before you were born."

"Being a good mother, it seemed to me, meant you ran the risk of losing your child."

"Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived lives of the parents."

"I can encourage my daughter to love her body, but what really matters are the observations she makes about my relationship with my own body."

"Most parents are not really 'supportive' because they want their kid(s) to succeed; they 'support' their kid(s) as an attempt to avoid appearing to have bred a failure, or, failures - in the eyes of their peers and/or neighbours."
Explore more quotes by John Irving

"This was not of the nature of a Christlike lesson for Owen Meany to learn, as he lay in the manger, that someone you hate can give you a hard-on."

"The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child."

"Ruth Cole was a novelist, novelists are not at their best when they go off half-cocked. She believed that she would prepare what she was going to tell the police - preferably in writing."

"Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy."

"A person's faith goes at its own pace. The trouble with church is the service. A service is conducted for a mass audience. Just when I start to like the hymn, everyone plops down to pray. Just when I start to hear the prayer, everyone pops up to sing. And what does the stupid sermon have to do with God? Who knows what God thinks of current events? Who cares?"

"Unlike Alice, Garp was a real writer -not because he wrote more beautifully than she wrote but because he knew what every artist should know: as Garp put it, '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. Garp did not write faster than anyone else, or more; he simply always worked with the idea of completion in mind."
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