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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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Science disembodies art embodies.
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You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts.
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I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itinerary decided before entry.
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The practise of an art is essential to the whole man, not because of what art is but because of what art does to the artist.
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Our knowledge of what the richer than ourselves possess, and the poor do not, has never been more widespread. Therefore, envy, which is wanting what others have, and jealousy, which is not wanting others to have what one has, have never been more widespread.
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The great majority of modern third-person narration is I narration very thinly disguised.
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Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band-master who stood against everything creative in the art of his time.
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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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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.
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Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.
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Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can't have affected you.
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The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
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These last few days I've felt Godless. I've felt cleaner, less muddled, less blind. I still believe in a God. But he's so remote, so cold, so mathematical. I see that we have to live as if there is no God. Prayer and worship and singing hymns-all silly and useless.
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I read and I read and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality.
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One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.
John Fowles
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Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
John Fowles
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Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.
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Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls around its Versailles and personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art.
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We chase the reward, we get the reward and then we discover that the true reward is always the next reward. Buying pleasure is a false end.
John Fowles
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Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.
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