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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
Characters
Begin
Events
Character
Live
Disobey

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Content is a word unknown to life it is also a word unknown to man.
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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.
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That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.
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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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He felt himself in suspension between the two worlds, the warm, neat civilization behind his back, the cool, dark mystery outside. We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
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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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Between skin and skin, there is only light.
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If a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence.
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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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Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.
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Just those three words, said and meant. I love you. They were quite hopeless. He said it as he might have said, I have cancer. His fairy story.
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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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And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did.
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The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.
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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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We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.
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One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.
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Time is not a road - it is a room.
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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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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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