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
Garden
Creating
Leafless
Tell
Lifeless
Nothing
Diary
Writing
Diaries
Alternative
Trying
Alternatives
Really
Totally
People

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There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.
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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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All pasts are like poems one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.
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Ask me to marry you. Will you marry me? No.
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Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.
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Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass give me plain glass.
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Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.' To live alone?' To live. With what you are.
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The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
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That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.
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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.
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Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band-master who stood against everything creative in the art of his time.
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Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.
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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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I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can't you understand? I don't think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice things are ugly and a lot of nasty things are beautiful.
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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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The profoundest distances are never geographical.
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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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Baseball and cricket are beautiful and highly stylized medieval war substitutes, chess made flesh, a mixture of proud chivalry and base-in both senses-greed.
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The practise of an art is essential to the whole man, not because of what art is but because of what art does to the artist.
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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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