Quote

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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John Fowles
Age: 79 †
Born: 1926
Born: March 31
Died: 2005
Died: November 5
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Teacher
Writer
Leigh-on-Sea
Essex
Things
Mercy
Think
Beyond
Bits
Thinking
Dies
Live
Nothing
Great
Even
Insects

More quotes by John Fowles

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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.
John Fowles
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Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.
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All pasts are like poems one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.
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To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.
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Wealth is a monster. It takes a month to learn to control it financially. And many years to learn to control it psychologically.
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If you want to be true to life, start lying about it
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The diary will really try and tell people who you are and what you were. The alternative is writing nothing, or creating a totally lifeless, as it is leafless, garden.
John Fowles
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Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.
John Fowles
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There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.
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I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.
John Fowles
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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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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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There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be.
John Fowles
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Time is not a road - it is a room.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles
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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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I am going to explain to you why we went to war. Why mankind always goes to war. It is not social or political. It is not countries that go to war, but men. It is like salt. Once one has been to war, one has salt for the rest of one's life. Do you understand?
John Fowles
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There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.
John Fowles
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To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
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