A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
John IrvingRead
But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.
Interpretation
Love often blurs the line between reality and imagination.
John Irving's quote explores the complex nature of love, suggesting that even authentic feelings of love are influenced by our imagination. This highlights how our perceptions and fantasies can shape our emotional experiences, making it difficult to discern genuine love from mere idealization.
In practice
During a wedding toast, one might quote this to highlight the mysterious nature of love.
A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
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.
It's not very interesting to establish sympathy for people who, on the surface, are instantly sympathetic. I guess I'm always attracted to people who, if their lives were headlines in a newspaper, you might not be very sympathetic about them.
It is an important distinction to note that she looked not only as if she had taken good care of herself, but that she had good reason to have done so. (...) She looked to be in such total possession of her life that only the most confident men could continue to look at her if she looked back at them. Even in bus stations, she was a woman who was stared at only until she looked back.
I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes β toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings.
I will not wait to love as best as I can. We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love.
Our life is all grounded and rooted in love, and without love we may not live.
Goodbye, Papa, you saved me. You taught me to read. No one can play like you. I'll never drink champagne. No one can play like you." -Liesel
The psychological and physiological mechanism of love is so complex that at a certain period in his life a young man must concentrate all his energy on coming to grips with it, and in this way he misses the actual content of the love: the woman he loves. (In this he is much like a young violinist who cannot concentrate on the emotional content of a piece until the technique required to play it comes automatically.)
They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two: the passion of their pretense created the actuality. Here, finally, was the quintessence of self-expression-- yet it was probable that for the most part their love expressed Gloria rather than Anthony. He felt often like a scarecly tolerated guest at a party she was giving.
The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.