Quote

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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John Fowles
Age: 79 †
Born: 1926
Born: March 31
Died: 2005
Died: November 5
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Teacher
Writer
Leigh-on-Sea
Essex
Creating
Leafless
Tell
Lifeless
Nothing
Diary
Writing
Diaries
Trying
Alternative
Really
Alternatives
People
Totally
Garden

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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?
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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.
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One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.
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Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.
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If a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence.
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You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed.
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Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
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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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To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.
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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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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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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.
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I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope - an impotence, in short and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
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The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
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Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan--that is the rule.
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