A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.
John IrvingRead
If watching television doesn't hasten death, it surely manages to make death very inviting; for television so shamelessly sentimentalizes and romanticizes death that it makes the living feel they have missed something - just by staying alive.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote critiques how television portrays death in a glamorous way, making life seem less valuable.
John Irving's quote reflects on the way television often romanticizes death, suggesting that its portrayal can make life feel unfulfilling or mundane by comparison. This sentiment implies that the way media presents death can lead the living to perceive their existence as lacking, overshadowing the value of life itself.
Themes
TelevisionDeathLifeSentimentalizingRomanticizing
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the impact of media on mental health.
More from John Irving
All quotes →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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 – toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings.
John IrvingRead
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