John Fowles Quotes - Page 6

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• We lay on the ground and kissed. Perhaps you smile. That we only lay on the ground and kissed. You young people can lend your bodies now, play with them, give them as we could not. But remember that you have paid a price: that of a world rich in mystery and delicate emotion. It is not only species of animal that die out. But whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know. But pity yourself for what it did.

  John Fowles

  Wise, Animal, Past

  1965 The Magus, ch.24.

  4 Copy quote

• It's no good. I've been trying to sleep for the last half-hour, and I can't. Writing here is a sort of drug. It's the only thing I look forward to. This afternoon I read what I wrote... And it seemed vivid. I know it seems vivid because my imagination fills in all the bits another person wouldn't understand. I mean, it's vanity. But it seems a sort of magic... And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did

  John Fowles

  Writing, Mean, Sleep

  John Fowles (2010). “The Collector”, p.165, Random House

  4 Copy quote

• Baseball and cricket are beautiful and highly stylized medieval war substitutes, chess made flesh, a mixture of proud chivalry and base-in both senses-greed.

  John Fowles

  Beautiful, Baseball, War

  9 Copy quote

• Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band-master who stood against everything creative in the art of his time.

  John Fowles

  Music, Art, Creative

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• Just those three words, said and meant. I love you. They were quite hopeless. He said it as he might have said, I have cancer. His fairy story.

  John Fowles

  Cancer, Love You, Fairy Stories

  John Fowles (1980). “The collector”, Dell Pub Co

  4 Copy quote

• Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependent on 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.

  John Fowles

  Hazards, Looks, May

  "The Aristos".

  4 Copy quote

• She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.' 'Prose and pudding?''I don't expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls.

  John Fowles

  Passion, Men, Soul

  John Fowles (1965). “The Magus”

  4 Copy quote

• I suppose I'd had, by the standards of that pre-permissive time, a good deal of sex for my age. Girls, or a certain kind of girl, liked me; I had a car-not so common among undergraduates in those days-and I had some money. I wasn't ugly; and even more important, I had my loneliness, which, as every cad knows, is a deadly weapon with women. My 'technique' was to make a show of unpredictability, cynicism, and indifference. Then, like a conjurer with his white rabbit, I produced the solitary heart.

  John Fowles

  Girl, Sex, Loneliness

  John Fowles (1965). “The Magus”

  4 Copy quote

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

  John Fowles

  Thinking, America, Like Me

  7 Copy quote

• I think it is interesting that we have come back to star- and space ships. Jet will do for a transport shorthand; yet when man really reaches, across the vast seas of space, he still reaches in ships.

  John Fowles

  Stars, Men, Thinking

  John Fowles (2010). “Wormholes”, p.328, Random House

  4 Copy quote

• Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.

  John Fowles

  Evil, Pot, Duty

  JOHN FOWLES (1969). “THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN”

  4 Copy quote

• The ordinary man is the curse of civilization.

  John Fowles

  Men, Civilization, Ordinary

  John Fowles (1963). “The collector”

  4 Copy quote

• Content is a word unknown to life; it is also a word unknown to man.

  John Fowles

  Life, Men, Contentment

  5 Copy quote

• No amount of reading and intelligent deduction could supplant the direct experience.

  John Fowles

  Reading, Intelligent, Experience

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• I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope - an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.

  John Fowles

  Effort, Green, Cynicism

  John Fowles (1968). “The Magus”, Pan

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• He knew the world and its absurdities as only an intelligent Irishman can; which is to say that where his knowledge or memory failed him, his imagination was always ready to fill the gap.

  John Fowles

  Memories, Intelligent, Imagination

  JOHN FOWLES “THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN”

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  John Fowles

  Hate, Mean, Piers

  John Fowles (1980). “The collector”, Dell Pub Co

  4 Copy quote

• Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls around its Versailles; and personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art.

  John Fowles

  Art, Wall, Hate

  JOHN FOWLES (1969). “THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN”

  8 Copy quote

• The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time; our sense of that, not a disinterested love of science, and certainly not wisdom, is why we devote such a huge proportion of the ingenuity and income of our societies to finding faster ways of doing things - as if the final aim of mankind was to grow closer not to a perfect humanity, but to a perfect lightning-flash.

  John Fowles

  Time, Perfect, Humanity

  JOHN FOWLES (1969). “THE FRENCH LIEUTENTANT'S WOMAN”

  4 Copy quote

• There are two kinds of hangover: in one you feel ill and incapable, in the other you feel ill and lucid.

  John Fowles

  Hangover, Two, Kind

  JOHN FOWLES (1969). “THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN”

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• Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.' To live alone?' To live. With what you are.

  John Fowles

  Mirrors, Suffering, Greece

  John Fowles (1965). “The Magus”

  4 Copy quote

• You must make, always. You must act, if you believe something. Talking about acting is like boasting about pictures you're going to paint. The most terrible bad form.

  John Fowles

  Believe, Talking, Acting

  John Fowles (1963). “The collector”

  4 Copy quote

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

  John Fowles

  Night, Risk, Lasts

  1965 The Magus, ch.19.

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  John Fowles

  Beautiful, Hate, Trying

  John Fowles (2010). “The Collector”, p.203, Random House

  4 Copy quote

• I mean I never feel I feel what I ought to feel.

  John Fowles

  Mean, Feels, Ought

  John Fowles (1963). “The collector”

  4 Copy quote

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