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You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. One day you will know what that means, perhaps. And you will smile. Not against me. But with me.

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
Wish
Means
Mean
Liked
Smile
Perhaps
Simply

More quotes by John Fowles

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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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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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We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
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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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That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.
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.
John Fowles
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Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.
John Fowles
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Science disembodies art embodies.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles
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I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope - an impotence, in short and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
John Fowles
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The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.
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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.
John Fowles
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Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan--that is the rule.
John Fowles
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He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.
John Fowles
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One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles
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All pasts are like poems one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.
John Fowles
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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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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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Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.
John Fowles