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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
Simply
Wish
Means
Mean
Liked
Smile
Perhaps

More quotes by John Fowles

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Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan--that is the rule.
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Time is not a road - it is a room.
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My hatred of crowds, the obviousness of crowds, of anything en masse. Is this why I like little-known books? A general desire to escape the main world.
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The profoundest distances are never geographical.
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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.
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I knew words were like chains, they held me back . . . the act of description taints the description.
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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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To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
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We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
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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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There are some men who are consoled by the idea that there are women less attractive than their wives and others who are haunted by the knowledge that there are more attractive.
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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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It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.
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One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.
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Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?
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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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Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass give me plain glass.
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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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There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.
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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.
John Fowles