A Quote by John Irving
I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.
Related Quotes
Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.
The entire deaths of Vietnam died in vain. And they're dying in vain right this very second. And you know what's worse than a soldier dying in vain? It's more soldiers dying in vain. That's what's worse.
I've learned that success comes in a very prickly package. Whether you choose to accept it or not is up to you. It's what you choose to do with it, the people you choose to surround yourself with. Always choose people that are better than you. Always choose people that challenge you and are smarter than you. Always be the student. Once you find yourself to be the teacher, you've lost it.
John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.
Find better company, find company of people better than yourself so you be surrounded with those best in character and so you may learn something.
There would be nothing I could do to you that would harm you more than what you're already doing to harm yourself...You are never going to amount to anything. You will always be the worthless muck people scrape from their shoes. You only get one life and you are wasting yours. That's a terrible shame. I doubt you will ever know what it is to be truly happy, to achieve anything of worth, to have genuine pride in yourself. You bring it all on yourself, and I could do no worse to you.
When things are bad, we take comfort in the thought that they could always get worse. And when they are, we find hope in the thought that things are so bad they have to get better.
It may well be that you are in a bad state, but to keep company with someone worse than you would allow to see good in yourself.
I've learned you can always achieve more than you thought you could. There are moments when I've walked off the court, and I'm like, 'I don't know how I won that match.' It was actually impossible, but it happened, and then you realize that you can push yourself much further than you ever thought, and you can make the impossible happen.
Whether it's a spouse, family member, coworker, former classmate, or the mother of your child's best friend - you know exactly what I mean. Just when you feel your worst and are judging yourself harshly, someone comes along who seems determined to make you feel even worse about yourself than you already do. Who needs it?
Back in the late '90s, I put together a humorous newsmagazine program called 'The Awful Truth' for Bravo. We helped one guy get an organ transplant whose insurance company had refused to pay. I thought, if we could save a guy's life in a 10-minute segment on cable, what could we do if we devoted a whole movie to a whole bunch of people?
Being a former engineer, you learn to always go back, study yourself, see what you could've done differently, see what you could've said.
I thought dying for your country was the worst thing that could happen to you. I think killing for your country can be a lot worse. Because that's the memory that haunts.
Nothing [the demon] could think up was half as bad as the stuff [people] thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into their design somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse.
...Blessed be the heart who finds its way to the eternal summer. - where grateful happiness is found through understanding that whatever your situation is, it could always be worse, but isn't... and the thought that things could always be better and the bitter unhappiness this creates is discarded!
There's nothing easy about building a company at all. I find it really hard, just painful and difficult, and if you are successful, it's even worse than if you fail.
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