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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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"Life is an intricate play with actors waiting for an explanation. Each added act confers a new interpretation of the story. ['Waiting for the pieces to fall into place']"

"And the great owners, who had become through the might of their holdings both more and less than men."

"Something has happened to our intelligence. My reasoning is this: arrangements of part of the Brain is a language. We are parts of the Brain; therefore, we are language. Why, then, do we not know this?"

"It seems quite pointless to waste health relentlessly in order to earn money that we shall spend on recovering health."

"And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way."

"The mind-is not the heart.I may yet live, as I know others live,To wish in vain to let go with the mind-Of cares, at night, to sleep; but nothing tells meThat I need learn to let go with the heart."

"Fire and IceSome say the world will end in fire,Some say in ice.From what I've tasted of desireI hold with those who favor fire.But if it had to perish twice,I think I know enough of hateTo say that for destruction iceIs also greatAnd would suffice."

"TO BE is life's dilemma while facing the eternity of death."

"We must not learn to try harder. The key is to learn how not to try in the first place."

"At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?"
Explore more quotes by John Fowles


"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."


"I hate people who collect things and classify things and give them names and then forget all about them. That's what people are always doing in art. They call a painter an impressionist or a cubist or something and then they put him in a drawer and don't see him as a living individual painter any more."


"He said, one has to learn that painting well - in the academic and technical sense - comes right at the bottom of the list. I mean, you've got that ability. So have thousands."


"Nine-tenths of all artistic creation derives its basic energy from the engine of repression and sublimation, and well beyond the strict Freudian definition of those terms.John Fowles attended new College in Oxford. You might like to see my collection of Oxford trees at Rob's Bookshop."


"This pain, this terrible seeing-through that is in me now. It wasn't necessary. It is all pain, and it buys nothing. Gives birth to nothing.All in vain. All wasted.The older the world becomes, the more obvious it is. The bomb and the tortures in Algeria and the starving babies in the Congo. It gets bigger and darker.More and more suffering for more and more. And more and more in vain."


"I left a pause. 'You sound like a certain kind of surgeon. A lot more interested in the operation than the patient.' 'I should not like to be in the hands of a surgeon who did not take that view."


"Everything free and decent in life is being locked away in filthy little cellars by beastly people who don't care."


"Labor is a man crowning glory.""Not this man's.""I quote Marx"I raised my hands. The pickaxe handle had been rough."I quote blisters."
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