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Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.

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
Good
Pot
Holds
Duty
Greatest
Whatever
Evil

More quotes by John Fowles

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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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There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.
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Ask me to marry you. Will you marry me? No.
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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.
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I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren't ashamed of being dull and little.
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And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did.
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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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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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I knew words were like chains, they held me back . . . the act of description taints the description.
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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.
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We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
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When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies
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Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
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The great majority of modern third-person narration is I narration very thinly disguised.
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The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
John Fowles
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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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You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles
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The newspapers are full of what we would like to happen to us and what we hope will never happen to us.
John Fowles
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I have a strange illusion quite often. I think I've become deaf. I have to make a little noise to prove I'm not. I clear my throat to show myself that everything is normal. It's like the little Japanese girl they found in the ruins of Hiroshima. Everything dead and she was singing to her doll.
John Fowles