“There are so many sane, boring people in this world. My goal in life is to not become like them.”

“The only way to really know whether or not you will like a book, is to read it.”

“There are so many people. It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.”

“Don't tell me you're one of those people who becomes their disease. I know so many people like that disheartening. Like, cancer is in the growth business, right?”

“Crazy people made him crazy. It was as if he personally resented them giving into madness - in part, because he so frequently labored to behave sanely. When some people gave up the labor of sanity, or failed at it, Garp suspected them of not trying hard enough. ”

“My days had a pleasant identicalness about them. I had always liked that: I liked routine. I liked being bored. I didn’t want to but I did.”

“You don’t have to know a lot of things for your life to make a lasting difference in the world. But you do have to know the few great things that matter, perhaps just one, and then be willing to live for them and die for them. The people that make a durable difference in the world are not the people who have mastered many things, but who have been mastered by one great thing.”