The kind of people claiming to be in communication with God today . . . they are enough to drive a real Christian crazy! And how about these evangeli… - John Irving

The kind of people claiming to be in communication with God today … they are enough to drive a real Christian crazy!

Just accept as a fact that everyone of any emotional importance to you is related to everyone else of any emotional importance to you; these relationships need not extend to blood, of course, but the people who change your life emotionally - all those people, from different places, from different times, spanning many wholly unrelated coincidences - are nonetheless 'related'. We associate people with each other for emotional not for factual reasons - people who've never met each other, who don't even know each other exists; people, even, who have forgotten us.

Unlike Alice, Garp was a real writer — not because he wrote more beautifully than she wrote but because he knew what every artist should know: as Garp put it, 'You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.' Even if these so-called endings and beginnings are illusions. Garp did not write faster than anyone else, or more; he simply always worked with the idea of completion in mind.

… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.