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It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.

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
Disobey
Characters
Begin
Events
Character
Live

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Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?
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His statement to himself should have been, 'I possess this now, therefore I am happy', instead of what it so Victorianly was: I cannot possess this for ever, and therefore am sad.
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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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Ask me to marry you. Will you marry me? No.
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The great majority of modern third-person narration is I narration very thinly disguised.
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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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The dead live. How do they live? By love.
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Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
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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?
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And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did.
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Content is a word unknown to life it is also a word unknown to man.
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I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.
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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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Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.
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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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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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The American myth is of free will in its simple, primary sense. One can choose oneself and will oneself and this absurdly optimistic assumption so dominates the republic that it has bred all its gross social injustices.
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All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
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Between skin and skin, there is only light.
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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