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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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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.
John Fowles
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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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There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.
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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.
John Fowles
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One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.
John Fowles
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Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass give me plain glass.
John Fowles
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To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
John Fowles
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And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did.
John Fowles
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If you forget everything else about me, please remember this. I walked down that street and I never looked back and I love you. I love you. I love you so much that I shall hate you for ever for today.
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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Ask me to marry you. Will you marry me? No.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles
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Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
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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Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.
John Fowles
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The profoundest distances are never geographical.
John Fowles
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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.
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.
John Fowles
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I knew words were like chains, they held me back . . . the act of description taints the description.
John Fowles