John Fowles: Trending quotes (page 2)

“I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren't ashamed of being dull and little.”

“We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.”

“I am infinitely strange to myself.”

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

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

“The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke.
We're so weak physically, so helpless with things. Still, even today. But we're stronger than they are. We can stand their cruelty. They can't stand ours.”

“It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.”

“The ordinary man is the curse of civilization.”

“The dead live."
"How do they live?"
"By love.”

“Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.”

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

“I read and I read; and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality.”

“If anything might hurt her, silence would; and I wanted to hurt her.”

“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.”

“Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.”

“They're beautiful. But sad.'
Everything's sad if you make it so, I said.”

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

“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.”

“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.”