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To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.

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
Apparently
Escape
Suicide
Commit
Poetry
Write
Writing
Contradictory
Really
Attempts

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The great majority of modern third-person narration is I narration very thinly disguised.
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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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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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You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed.
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All pasts are like poems one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.
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The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.
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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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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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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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Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
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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.
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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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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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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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If you want to be true to life, start lying about it
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She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.' 'Prose and pudding?''I don't expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls.
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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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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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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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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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