John Fowles citations

Page 2

“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.”

“Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.”

“There are some men who are consoled by the idea that there are women less attractive than their wives; and others who are haunted by the knowledge that there are more attractive.”

“We are all in flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo Sapiens.”

“There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves.”

“Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.”

“The moon hung over the planet Earth, a dead thing over a dying thing.”

“It is me. I am his madness. For years he's been looking for something to put his madness into. And he found me.”

“There are many reasons why novelists write but they all have one thing in common a need to create an alternative world.”

“I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness, to death.”

“They looked down on her; and she looked up through them.”

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

“I mean I never feel I feel what I ought to feel.”

“The world began in hazard and will end in it.”

“The profoundest distances are never geographical.”

“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?”

“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.”

“The best wines take the longest to mature.”

“… all cynicism masks a failure to cope.”

“The sky is absolutely empty. Beautifully pure and empty.

As if the architects and builders would live in all the houses they built! Or could live in them all. It's obvious, it stares you in the fact. Therebe a God and heknow anything about us.”

“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.”