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Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.

John Fowles

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John Fowles
Age: 79 †
Born: 1926
Born: March 31
Died: 2005
Died: November 5
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Teacher
Writer
Leigh-on-Sea
Essex
Trivial
Largely
Pretending
Consists
Critical
Duty
Corny

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Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan--that is the rule.
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I am one in a row of specimens. It's when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I'm meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive. but it's the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead.
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To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
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All pasts are like poems one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.
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If you want to be true to life, start lying about it
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Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.' To live alone?' To live. With what you are.
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Baseball and cricket are beautiful and highly stylized medieval war substitutes, chess made flesh, a mixture of proud chivalry and base-in both senses-greed.
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Between skin and skin, there is only light.
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One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.
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To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.
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The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke. We're so weak physically, so helpless with things. Still, even today. But we're stronger than they are. We can stand their cruelty. They can't stand ours.
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All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
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I have a strange illusion quite often. I think I've become deaf. I have to make a little noise to prove I'm not. I clear my throat to show myself that everything is normal. It's like the little Japanese girl they found in the ruins of Hiroshima. Everything dead and she was singing to her doll.
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If you forget everything else about me, please remember this. I walked down that street and I never looked back and I love you. I love you. I love you so much that I shall hate you for ever for today.
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Wealth is a monster. It takes a month to learn to control it financially. And many years to learn to control it psychologically.
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It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.
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Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?
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There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.
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Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependent on it. Even though I arrange for a pleasure, and look forward to it, my eventual enjoyment of it is still a matter of hazard. Wherever time passes, there is hazard.
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I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.
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