Authors
John Fowles Quotes
Best Quotes by John Fowles (Top 10)
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The human race is unimportant. It is the self that must not be betrayed.I suppose one could say that Hitler didn't betray his self.You are right. He did not. But millions of Germans did betray their selves. That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.
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I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that's the lot. There's no mercy in things. There's not even a Great Beyond. There's nothing.
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The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
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We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
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We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.
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I am infinitely strange to myself.
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The profoundest distances are never geographical.
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There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.
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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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In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.
John Fowles
More John Fowles Quotes
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In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.
John Fowles -
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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There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.
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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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Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
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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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Time is not a road - it is a room.
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The noblest relationship is marriage, that is, love. Its nobility resides in its altruism, the desire to serve another beyond all the pleasures of the relationship; and in its refusal ever to regard the other as a thing, an object, a utilizability. Sex is an exchange of pleasures, of needs; love is a giving without return. It is this giving without return, this helping without reward, this surplus of pure good, that identifies the uniqueness of man as well as the true nature of the true marriage. This is the quintessence the great alchemy of sex is for.
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Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.
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Content is a word unknown to life; it is also a word unknown to man.
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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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Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want.
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In essence the Renaissance was simply the green end of one of civilization's hardest winters.
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Whatever sympathy I feel towards religions, whatever admiration for some of their adherents, whatever historical or biological necessity I see in them, whatever metaphorical truth, I cannot accept them as credible explanations of reality; and they are incredible to me in proportion to the degree that they require my belief in positive human attributes and intervenient powers in their divinities.
John Fowles