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Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.

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
Choices
Moral
Human
Humans
Matter
Atheist
Obligation
Atheism
Choice

More quotes by John Fowles

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That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.
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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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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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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I knew words were like chains, they held me back . . . the act of description taints the description.
John Fowles
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Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
John Fowles
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Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.
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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The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.
John Fowles
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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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All pasts are like poems one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.
John Fowles
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The best wines take the longest to mature.
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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She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.' 'Prose and pudding?''I don't expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls.
John Fowles
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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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Just those three words, said and meant. I love you. They were quite hopeless. He said it as he might have said, I have cancer. His fairy story.
John Fowles
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It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.
John Fowles
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Science disembodies art embodies.
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