Quotes from book
Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin
John Fowles

Daniel Martin is a novel by John Fowles. It was first published in 1977 and can be taken as a Bildungsroman, following the life of the eponymous protagonist. The novel uses both first and third person voices, whilst employing a variety of literary techniques such as multiple narratives and flashback. The author suggests that the book is concerned with "Englishness - what it is like to be English in the late 20th century.

“I hated myself. I had created nothing, I belonged to nothingness, to the néant, and it seemed to me that my own death was the only thing that I could create; and still, even then, I thought it might accuse everyone who had ever known me. It would validate all my cynicism, it would prove all my solitary selfishness; it would stand, and be remembered, as a final dark victory.”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“I didn’t know at that time Emily Dickinson’s great definition, her 'Publication is not the business of poets’; being a poet is all, being known as a poet is nothing.”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“It. Is. Not. Ended. There was just the trace of a humourless smile on his face; and more than a trace of menace. As if he meant something more than that there was a sequel to this scene; but that the whole Nazi weltanschaaung to be, resurrected and realised. He was an impressively iron man…”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“Narcissism: when one grows too old to believe in one's uniqueness, one falls in love with one's complexity.”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Source: Daniel Martin (1977), Ch. 2, Games

“We were equally tired, in mid-century, of cold sanity and hot blasphemy; of the over-cerebral and of the over-faecal; the way out lay somewhere else. Words had lost their power, either for good or for evil; still hung, like a mist, over the reality of action, distorting, misleading, castrating; but at least since Hitler and Hiroshima they were seen to be a mist, a flimsy superstructure.”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“All the time I felt I was being watched, that I was not alone, that I was putting on an act for the benefit of someone, that this action could be done only if it was spontaneous, pure – and moral. Because more and more it crept through my mind with the chill spring night that I was trying to commit not a moral action, but a fundamentally aesthetic one; to do something that would end my life sensationally, significantly, consistently. It was a Mercutio death I was looking for, not a real one. A death to be remembered, not the true death of a true suicide, the death obliterate.”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirteen thousand killed--thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes--because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself--and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud.”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“I still couldn’t accept that this was not some nightmare, like some freak misbinding in a book, a Lawrence novel become, at the turn of a page, one by Kafka.”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“By this characteristically twentieth century retreat from content into form, from meaning into appearance, from ethics into aesthetics, from aqua into unda, I dulled the pain of accusing death, and hardened myself.”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“You sound like a certain kind of surgeon. A lot more interested in the operation than the patient."
"I should not be in the hands of a surgeon who did not take that view.”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“So I strode down to the school like some vengence-brewing chieftain in an Icelandic saga…”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“She had a kind of genius for picking the wrong man. She always looked for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole romantic kitchen, whereas I lived by a simpler diet, prose and pudding. I don’t expect attractive men to have attractive souls.”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope – an impotence, in short and to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all…”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria.”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Source: Daniel Martin (1977), Ch. 1, p. 1

“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 book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“(The staff common room) was real boredom, not just modish ennui. Boredom, the numbing annual predictability of life, hung over the staff like a cloud. From it flowed cant, hypocrisy, and the impotent rage of the old who know they have failed and the young who suspect they will fail. The senior masters stood like Gallows sermons; with some of them one had a sort of vertigo, a glimpse of the bottomless pit of human futility…a sere notifier of what is.”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“Once again fear, and mystery, swept over me…I was infinitely far from home. The profoundest distances are never geographical…”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“The writing was impeccably neat and legible though rather crabbed into the centre of the page; I saw a neat crabbed man behind it. Presumably some sort of retreat, one of those desiccated young Catholics that used to mince around Oxford when I was an undergraduate.”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“Though not large it had a certain elegance; a pilastered portico, windows with graceful pediments. The whitewashed façade was in shadow, a palid blue against the evening sky’s pale blue.”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“All good science is art. And all good art is science.”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

Similar authors

John Fowles photo
John Fowles120
British writer 1926–2005
A.A. Milne photo
A.A. Milne169
British author None
Doris Lessing photo
Doris Lessing94
British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer … None
V.S. Naipaul photo
V.S. Naipaul34
Trinidadian-British writer of Indo-Nepalese ancestry None
Arthur C. Clarke photo
Arthur C. Clarke207
British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, u… None
W. Somerset Maugham photo
W. Somerset Maugham158
British playwright, novelist, short story writer None
Elias Canetti photo
Elias Canetti43
Bulgarian-born Swiss and British jewish modernist novelist,… None
William Golding photo
William Golding79
British novelist, poet, playwright and Nobel Prize for Lite… None
Kazuo Ishiguro photo
Kazuo Ishiguro76
Japanese-born British author None
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien photo
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien78
British philologist and author, creator of classic fantasy … None