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"Our accepting what we are must always inhibit our being what we ought to be."
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"To me, living in the present means being aware of your conscious choice to focus on the past, present or future - it is not necessarily having to focus on the present."
"Being president is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There's nothing to do but to stand there and take it."
"Being a hero is about the shortest-lived profession on earth."
"One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often."
"Your unstoppable nature is becoming and blooming - you simply, are. Go easy."
Explore more quotes by John Fowles
"I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness, to death."
"Thus it had come about that she had read far more fiction, and far more poetry, those two sanctuaries of the lonely, than most of her kind."
"Look, Miranda, he said, those twenty long years that lie between you and me. I've more knowledge of life than you, I've lived more and betrayed more and seen more betrayed. At your age one is bursting with ideals. You think that because I can sometimes see what's trivial and what's important in art that I ought to be more virtuous. But I don't want to be virtuous. My charm (if there is any) for you is simply frankness. And experience. Not goodness. I'm not a good man. Perhaps morally I'm younger even than you are. Can you understand that?"
"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."
"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."
"To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape. And my feelings, at the end of that wretched term, were those of a man who knows he's in a cage, exposed to the jeers of all his old ambitions until he dies."
"I could scream abuse at him all day long; he wouldn't mind at all. It's me he wants, my look, my outside; not my emotions or my mind or my soul or even my body. Not anything human."
"Sometimes I almost pity them. I think I have a freedom they cannot understand. No insult, no blame can touch me. Because I have set myself beyond the pale. I am nothing, I am hardly human any more. I am the French Lieutenant's Whore."
"Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish if we are to live in society. It is one I have long ago banished from my life. You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be."
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