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Book: The Tree
Quotes of Book: The Tree
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  1. John Fowles _ The Tree

    We shall never fully understand nature {or ourselves}, and certainly never respect it, until we dissociate the wild from the notion of usability - however innocent and harmless the use. For it is the general uselessness of so much of nature that lies at the root of our ancient hostility and indifference to it.
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  2. John Fowles _ The Tree

    Despite all the identifying, measuring, photographing, I had managed to set the experience in a kind of present past, a having looked, even as I was temporally and physically still looking...It is not necessarily too little knowledge that causes ignorance; possessing too much, or wanting to gain too much, can produce the same result.
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  3. John Fowles _ The Tree

    We lack trust in the present, this moment, this actual seeing, because our culture tells us to trust only the reported back, the publicly framed, the edited, the thing set in the clearly artistic or the clearly scientific angle of perspective. One of the deepest lessons we have to learn is that nature, of its nature, resists this. It waits to be seen otherwise, in its individual presentness and from our individual presentness.
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  4. John Fowles _ The Tree

    what this instruction cannot give is the deepest benefit of any art, be it of making, or of knowing, or of experiencing: which is self-expression and self-discovery.
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  5. John Fowles _ The Tree

    These question-boundaries ...are ours, not of reality. We are led to them, caged by them not only culturally and intellectually, but quite physically, by the restlessness of our eyes and their limited field and acuity of vision.
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  6. John Fowles _ The Tree

    Ordinary experience, from waking second to second, is in fact highly synthetic {in the sense of combinative or constructive}, and made of a complexity of strands, past memories and present perceptions, times and places, private and public history, hopelessly beyond science's powers to analyse. It is quintessentially 'wild' ... unphilosophical, irrational uncontrollable, incalculable.
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  7. John Fowles _ The Tree

    Only fools think our attitude to our fellow men is a thing distinct from our attitude to 'lesser' life.
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  8. John Fowles _ The Tree

    Man is a highly acquisitive creature, brainwashed by most modern societies into believing that the act of acquisition is more enjoyable than the fact of having acquired, that getting beats having got."
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  9. John Fowles _ The Tree

    Perhaps nowhere is our human mania for possessing, our delusion that the owned cannot have a soul of its own, more harmful to us. This disanimation justified all the horrors of the African slave trade. If the black man is so stupid that he can be enslaved, he cannot have the soul of a white man, he must be a mere animal.
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  10. John Fowles _ The Tree

    No religion is the only religion, no church the true church.
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  11. John Fowles _ The Tree

    I happily forgot his little collection of crimped and cramped fruit trees in my own new world, my America of endless natural ones in Devon.
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  12. John Fowles _ The Tree

    Even the simplest knowledge of the names and habits of flowers or trees starts this distinguishing or individuating process, and removes us a step from total reality towards anthropocentrism."
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