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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
Evil
Good
Pot
Holds
Duty
Greatest
Whatever

More quotes by John Fowles

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I read and I read and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality.
John Fowles
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I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can't you understand? I don't think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice things are ugly and a lot of nasty things are beautiful.
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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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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.
John Fowles
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Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles
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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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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.
John Fowles
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The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.
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The profoundest distances are never geographical.
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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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Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.
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Another reason I think the novel will survive is that the reader has to work in a novel. In a film, you are presented with someone else's imagination exactly bodied out. The marvelous thing about a novel is that every reader will imagine even the very simplest sentence slightly differently.
John Fowles
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All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
John Fowles
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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 all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.
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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Ask me to marry you. Will you marry me? No.
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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Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band-master who stood against everything creative in the art of his time.
John Fowles