Quote

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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John Fowles
Age: 79 †
Born: 1926
Born: March 31
Died: 2005
Died: November 5
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Teacher
Writer
Leigh-on-Sea
Essex
Social
Assumption
Dominates
Sense
Myth
Injustices
Injustice
Bred
Oneself
Gross
Choose
Primaries
American
Primary
Simple
Republic
Free
Optimistic
Absurdly

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Science disembodies art embodies.
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It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.
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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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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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Always we try to put the wild in a cage.
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And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did.
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Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.
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Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass give me plain glass.
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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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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.
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He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.
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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 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.
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There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.
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The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
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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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Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can't have affected you.
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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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Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.
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The profoundest distances are never geographical.
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