Quote

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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John Fowles
Age: 79 †
Born: 1926
Born: March 31
Died: 2005
Died: November 5
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Teacher
Writer
Leigh-on-Sea
Essex
Dark
Civilization
Words
Poet
Suspension
Write
Mystery
Neat
Felt
Outside
Poems
Two
Behinds
Poets
Back
Behind
Worlds
Writing
Ones
Warm
World
Simply
Cool

More quotes by John Fowles

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The American myth is of free will in its simple, primary sense. One can choose oneself and will oneself and this absurdly optimistic assumption so dominates the republic that it has bred all its gross social injustices.
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
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The profoundest distances are never geographical.
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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Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls around its Versailles and personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art.
John Fowles
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The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?
John Fowles
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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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When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles
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We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles
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One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.
John Fowles
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Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.
John Fowles
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Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?
John Fowles
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We chase the reward, we get the reward and then we discover that the true reward is always the next reward. Buying pleasure is a false end.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles
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Time is not a road - it is a room.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles
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To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
John Fowles
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You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts.
John Fowles