Daily Inspiration Quote by John Irving

Normality is a private dialect, and Irving nails it with a sensory shortcut: bread. The smell is domestic, untheatrical, almost impossible to argue with. It’s also fleeting and involuntary, the kind of comfort that arrives before you’ve decided you deserve it. By anchoring “normal and nice” to something as bodily and everyday as fresh bread, he sidesteps the moralizing version of family and gives us the lived one: warmth, habit, routine, the small seductions that make even messy households feel like home from the inside.

The line “To each other” does the real work. Normal isn’t a universal category; it’s an agreement among people who share history, jokes, scars, and survival strategies. Irving’s subtext is that families don’t just tell stories, they manufacture reality. The second sentence, “We were just a family,” sounds plain but lands like a defense brief: don’t mythologize us, don’t pathologize us. We weren’t exceptional; we were coherent.

Then comes the twist: “In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.” That’s Irving’s wink at the narrative engine of kinship. Families run on hyperbole - nicknames, old grudges inflated into legend, harmless lies that protect the tender parts. Exaggeration becomes a kind of emotional shorthand, a way to keep intimacy moving when accuracy would stall it. In Irving’s world (often crowded with oddities and secrets), this is how the extraordinary gets folded into the ordinary: not by denial, but by shared language.