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We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.

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
Decent
Accepting
Human
Humans

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Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.
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He is solid immovable, iron-willed. He showed me one day his killing bottle. I'm imprisoned in it. Fluttering against the glass. Because I can see through it I still think I can escape. I have hope. But it's all an illusion. A thick round wall of glass.
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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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Time is not a road - it is a room.
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The profoundest distances are never geographical.
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I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.
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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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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.
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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.
John Fowles
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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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Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.
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Between skin and skin, there is only light.
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Our knowledge of what the richer than ourselves possess, and the poor do not, has never been more widespread. Therefore, envy, which is wanting what others have, and jealousy, which is not wanting others to have what one has, have never been more widespread.
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Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
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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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The best wines take the longest to mature.
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Art is a statement of one in the face of all not a statement by one for the use of all.
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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 am infinitely strange to myself.
John Fowles