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All pasts are like poems one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.

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
Poems
Poetry
Thousand
Past
Live
Things
Like
Pasts
Derive

More quotes by John Fowles

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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.
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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Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.
John Fowles
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Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?
John Fowles
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If you want to be true to life, start lying about it
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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Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass give me plain glass.
John Fowles
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Wealth is a monster. It takes a month to learn to control it financially. And many years to learn to control it psychologically.
John Fowles
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That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.
John Fowles
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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.
John Fowles
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Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
John Fowles
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Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.
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 most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
John Fowles
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Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.
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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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
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I knew words were like chains, they held me back . . . the act of description taints the description.
John Fowles
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To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
John Fowles