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"I am one in a row of specimens. It's when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I'm meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive. but it's the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead."
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"You are not what you think, but you are the reflection of what you think."

"When you are looking at a person, you are not seeing him; you are seeing yourself through his reflective mirror."

"What you think about yourself is more important than what others think about you."

"In the ancient times, when ignorance was the default mode of thinking, Krishna may have proven to be a glorious figure to be adored and relied on in times of distress, but in the modern world of conscientious humans, no Krishna is higher than the Human Self."

"You are one of the most beautiful and unique flowers in the garden of humanity."
Explore more quotes by John Fowles


"I don't think the English like me. I sold a colossal best seller in America, and they never really forgave me."


"If I could only escape, if I could only escape... he murmured the words to himself a dozen times; then metaphorically shook himself for being so impractical, so romantic, so dutiless."


"It's like the day you realize dolls are dolls. I pick up my old self and I see it's silly. A toy I've played with too often. It's a little sad, like an old golliwog at the bottom of the cupboard. Innocent and used-up and proud and silly."


"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."


"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."


"Her stare fixed me. Without rancour and without regret; without triumph and without evil; as Desdemona once looked back on Venice. On the incomprehension, the baffled rage of Venice. I had taken myself to be in some way the traitor Iago punished, in an unwritten sixth act. Chained in hell. But I was also Venice; the state left behind; the thing journeyed from."


"Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependant upon it. Even though I arrange for a pleasure; and look forward to it, my eventual enjoyment of it is still a matter of hazard. Wherever time passes, there is hazard. You may die before you turn the next page."


"Henry knew sin was a challenge to life; not an act of unreason, but an act of courage and determination."
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