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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.

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
Wise
Animal
Feeling
Dies
Feelings
Past
Whole
Pity
Never
Species

More quotes by John Fowles

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If you want to be true to life, start lying about it
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We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.
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I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can't you understand? I don't think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice things are ugly and a lot of nasty things are beautiful.
John Fowles
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Content is a word unknown to life it is also a word unknown to man.
John Fowles
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The absurdly neurotic role you and the rest of your kind have always attributed to me Erato, the Goddess Muse of Erotic Poetry bears no relation at all to reality. As a matter of fact, I was trained as a clinical psychologist. Who simply happens to have specialized in the mental illness that you, in your ignorance, call literature.
John Fowles
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The best wines take the longest to mature.
John Fowles
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The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?
John Fowles
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Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.
John Fowles
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Like all mystics (and many novelists, not least the present one) he is baffled, a child, before the real now far happier out of it, in a narrative past or a prophetic future, locked inside that weird tence grammar does not allow, the imaginary present.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles
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That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.
John Fowles
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Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.
John Fowles
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There are some men who are consoled by the idea that there are women less attractive than their wives and others who are haunted by the knowledge that there are more attractive.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles
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My hatred of crowds, the obviousness of crowds, of anything en masse. Is this why I like little-known books? A general desire to escape the main world.
John Fowles
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Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass give me plain glass.
John Fowles
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Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?
John Fowles
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All pasts are like poems one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.
John Fowles
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You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed.
John Fowles