All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
John FowlesRead
I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.
Interpretation
The quote reflects a deep acceptance of oneself, regardless of life's struggles or emptiness.
John Fowles expresses a profound understanding of self-acceptance and resilience in the face of personal emptiness and struggle. It suggests a commitment to living authentically and acknowledges the inevitability of suffering and disease in life, yet emphasizes the importance of choosing to continue living with oneself through all circumstances.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a personal empowerment seminar to encourage self-acceptance.
All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.
I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.
Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?
The bowed head, the buried face. She is silent, she will never speak, never forgive, never reach a hand, never leave this frozen present tense. All waits, suspended. Suspended the autumn trees, the autumn sky, anonymous people. A blackbird, poor fool, sings out of season from the willows by the lake. A flight of pigeons over the houses; fragments of freedom, hazard, an anagram made flesh. And somewhere the stinging smell of burning leaves.
It came to me…that I didn’t want to be anywhere else in the world at that moment, that what I was feeling at that moment justified all I had been through, because all I had been through was my being there. I was experiencing…a new self-acceptance, a sense that I had to be this mind and this body, its vices and its virtues, and that I had no other chance or choice.
For 13 to be unlucky would require there to be some kind of cosmic intelligence that counts things that humans count and that also makes certain things happen on certain dates or in certain places according to whether the number 13 'is involved' or not (whatever 'is involved' might mean).
Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equalled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism.
Tilting his head back he slowly released an enormous quantity of smoke from his mouth and drew it up through his nostrils. He continued to smoke in this "French-inhale" style. Very probably, it was not part of the sofa vaudeville of a showoff but, rather, the private, exposed achievement of a young man who, at one time or another, might have tried shaving himself left-handed.
History, as the study of the past, makes the coherence of what happened comprehensible by reducing events to a dramatic pattern and seeming them in a simple form.
Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations.
We all have a fundamental right to live free from fear, free from crime, and free from disorder - but while we share that right, we also share the duty to secure it.
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