John Fowles Quotes

...there are times when silence is a poem.

~ 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.

~ John Fowles

And I envy you. You have the one thing that matters. You have all your discoveries before you.

~ John Fowles

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.

~ John Fowles

That is how war corrupts us. It plays on our pride in our own free will.

~ John Fowles

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.

~ John Fowles

It's despair at the lack of (I'm cheating, I didn't say all these things - but I'm going to write what I want to say as well as what I did) feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It's despair that so few of us care. It's despair that there's so much brutality and callousness in the world.

~ John Fowles

So that the smile was not so much an attitude to be taken to life as the nature of the cruelty of life, a cruelty we cannot even choose to avoid, since it is human existence.

~ John Fowles

Because they died, we know we still live. Because a star explodes and a thousand worlds like ours die, we know this world is. That is the smile: that what might not be, is.

~ John Fowles

People who teach you cram old ideas, old views, old ways, into you. Like covering plants with layer after layer of old earth; it's no wonder the poor things so rarely come up fresh and green.

~ John Fowles

M. I’ve never really thought of M objectively before, as another person. She’s always been my mother I’ve hated or been ashamed of. Yet of all the lame ducks I’ve met or heard of, she’s the lamest. I’ve never given her enough sympathy. I haven’t given her this last year (since I left home) one half of the consideration I’ve given the beastly creature upstairs just this last week. I feel that I could overwhelm her with love now. Because I haven’t felt so sorry for her for years. I’ve always excused myself—I’ve said, I’m kind and tolerant with everyone else, she’s the one person I can’t be like that with, and there has to be an exception to the general rule. So it doesn’t matter. But of course that’s wrong. She’s the last person that should be an exception to the general rule.Minny and I have so often despised D for putting up with her. We ought to go down onour knees to him.

~ John Fowles

The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?

~ John Fowles

He said, it's rather like your voice. You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts. It's what distinguishes all great art from the other kind.

~ John Fowles

He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.

~ John Fowles

In spite of her superficial independence, her fundamental need was to cling.All her life was an attempt to disprove it; and so proved it. She was like a sea anemone -- had only to be touched once to adhere to what touched her.

~ John Fowles

I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks; I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itinerary decided before entry.

~ John Fowles

I must fight with my weapons. Not his. Not selfishness and brutality and shame and resentment.

~ John Fowles

Sometimes to return is a vulgarity.

~ John Fowles

The dead live. How do they live? By love.

~ John Fowles

He had not the benefit of existentialist terminology; but what he felt was a very clear case of the anxiety of freedom - that is, the realization that one is free and the realization that being free is a situation of terror

~ John Fowles

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

~ John Fowles

I have a strange illusion quite often. I think I've become deaf. I have to make a little noise to prove I'm not. I clear my throat to show myself that everything is normal. It's like the little Japanese girl they found in the ruins of Hiroshima. Everything dead, and she was singing to her doll.

~ John Fowles

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

~ John Fowles

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.

~ John Fowles

What you love is your own love. It's not love, it's selfishness. It's not me you think of, but what you feel about me.

~ John Fowles

A total stranger, and one not of one's sex, is often the least prejudiced judge.

~ John Fowles

The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.

~ John Fowles

Death starves us of life. So we learn to fabricate our own immortalities.

~ John Fowles

Some people would say- you're only a drop, your word-breaking is only a drop, it wouldn't matter. But all the evil in the world's made up of little drops. It's silly talking about the unimportance of the little drops. The little drops and the ocean are the same thing.

~ John Fowles

Now I understand why you grow so many flowers.She shifted her head, not understanding.I said, To cover the stink of sulphur.

~ John Fowles

There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be. You are too young to know this. You are still becoming. Not being.

~ John Fowles

I had always believed, and not only out of cynicism, that a man and a woman could tell in the first ten minutes whether they wanted to go to bed together; and that the time that passed after those first ten minutes represented a tax, which might be worth paying if the article promised to be really enjoyable, but which nine times out of ten became rapidly excessive.

~ John Fowles

It was an unforgettable painting; it set a dense golden halo of light round the most trivial of moments, so that the moment, and all such moments, could never be completely trivial again.

~ John Fowles

When I was going on one day in the car about not having any close friends - using my favourite metaphor: the cage of glass between me and the rest of the world - she just laughed. 'You like it,' she said. 'You say you're isolated, boyo, but you really think you're different.

~ John Fowles

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.

~ John Fowles

The world began in hazard and will end in it.

~ John Fowles

An answer is always a form of death.

~ John Fowles

If a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence.

~ John Fowles

In essence the renaissance is simply the green end of one of civilization's hardest winters.

~ John Fowles

In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.

~ John Fowles