A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
John IrvingRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects on the complexities of nature versus nurture in human development, arguing that reducing it to a simple debate is unproductive.
John Irving suggests that the debate between nature (what we are born with) and nurture (how our environment shapes us) is not only inconclusive but also tedious. He emphasizes that both aspects are deeply intertwined and contribute to the complexities of human existence, and thus oversimplifying this relationship undermines the richness of our understanding of life and personal growth.
Themes
NatureNurtureGrowthComplexityPhilosophy
In practice
Example use cases
This quote would be great to include in a discussion about child development in psychology class.
More from John Irving
All quotes βNo 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.
John IrvingRead
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.
John IrvingRead
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.
John IrvingRead
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.
John IrvingRead
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.
John IrvingRead
Similar quotes
Before you come alive, life is nothing; it 's up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing else but the meaning that you choose.
Jean-Paul SartreRead
Every baby born_x000D_ unloved, unwanted, is a bill that will come_x000D_ due in twenty years with interest, an anger_x000D_ that must find a target, a pain that will_x000D_ beget pain. A decade downstream a child_x000D_ screams, a woman falls, a synagogue is torched,_x000D_ a firing squad is summoned, a button_x000D_ is pushed and the world burns.
Marge PiercyRead
Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.
Leonardo Da VinciRead
Let us be dreamers, thinkers, speculative philosophers, or as our spouses would have it: Idiots
Douglas AdamsRead
There is an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.
Saul BellowRead
Instantaneous and mass communication is the mother of mass naivety. Should we then lose hope? Is there any hope? But to lose hope is as dangerous as to nurture false hope. Where then can we find hope that is responsible?
Tariq RamadanRead