John Fowles quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by John Fowles

John Fowles Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from John Fowles on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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

To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.

The newspapers are full of what we would like to happen to us and what we hope will never happen to us.

Death is not in the nature of things; it is the nature of things. But what dies is the form. The matter is immortal.

Sometimes to return is a vulgarity.

Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass; give me plain glass.

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

Victims?"
"Whatever you call people who are made to suffer without being given the choice."
"That sounds like an excellent definition of man.

Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation.

In essence the Renaissance was simply the green end of one of civilization's hardest winters.

a cloud, it would

You accept that you are English. You don't pretend that you'd rather be French or Italian or something else.

It makes me sick,the blindness, deadness, out-of-dateness, stodginess and, yes, sheer jealous malice of the great bulk of England.

Time is not a road - it is a room.

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

Think. In a minute from now you could be saying, I risked death. I threw for life, and I won life. It is a very wonderful feeling. To have survived.

We can sometimes recognize the looks of a century ago on a modern face; but never those of a century to come.

The word is the most imprecise of signs. Only a science-obsessed age could fail to comprehend that this is its great virtue, not its defect.

It's like being halfway through the book. I can't just throw it in the dustbin.

I'm only happy when I forget to exist. When just my eyes or my ears or my skin exist.

The great majority of modern third-person narration is "I" narration very thinly disguised.

Let those love now who've never loved; let those who've loved, love yet again.

In my opinion a lot of people who may seem happy now would do what I did or similar things if they had the money and the time. I

The evolution of human mentality has put us all in vitro now, behind the glass wall of our own ingenuity.

She had only a candle's light to see by, but candlelight never did badly by any woman.

But forgetting's not something you do, it happens to you.

She smiled at him as they waited for their dessert, her chin poised on her clasped hands.
'You're being very silent.'
'That's how men cry.

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

I hate beyond hate.

An answer is always a form of death.

It was curious how quiet that last evening was; as if I had already left, and we were just two ghosts talking to each other.

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

A thousand violins cloy very rapidly without percussion.

I knew words were like chains, they held me back ... the act of description taints the description.

Stop thinking about class, she'd say. Like a rich man telling a poor man to stop thinking about money.

Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.

That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.

I would have gone to bed with him that night. If he had asked. If he had come and kissed me. Not for his sake, but for being alive's.

The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.

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.

There cannot be any true leisure until all the world possesses it equally.

Wealth is a monster. It takes a month to learn to control it financially. And many years to learn to control it psychologically.

He said, men are vile. I said, the vilest thing about them is that they can say that with a smile on their faces.

Forgetting's not something you do, it happens to you. Only it didn't happen to me.

She liked doing things, and only then finding a reason for doing them.

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

If Rome, a city of the vulgar living, had been depressing after Greece, London, a city of the drab dead, was fifty times worse.

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

The Choice Spare him till he dies. Torment him till he lives.

Art is a statement of one in the face of all; not a statement by one for the use of all.

I am talking about the general psychological health
of the species, man. He needs the existence of
mysteries. Not their solution.

They knew they were like two grains of yeast in a sea of lethargic dough - two grains of salt in a vast tureen of insipid broth.

The last I saw of him was of a dark blue back marching towards Shaftesbury Avenue; eternally the victor in a war where the losers win.

All would be well when she was truly his; in his bed and in his bank ... and of course in his heart, too.

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

Laziness, I am afraid, was Charles's distinguishing trait.

One writes things and the implications shriek- it's like suddenly realizing one's deaf.

If you want to be true to life, start lying about it

I'm not really sorry. But I'm not absolutely unsorry.

Sex is just an activity, like anything else. It's not dirty, it's just two people playing with each other's bodies. Like dancing. Like a game.

But he was absolutely alone. No one ever wrote to him. Visited him. Totally alone. And I believe the happiest man I have ever met.

Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?

If you feel something deeply, you're not ashamed to show your feeling.

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

Humour is a manifestation of freedom. It is because there is freedom that there is smile.

Ever read this?"
"Let's cut corners. To hell with literature. You're clever and I'm beautiful. Now let's talk about who we really are.

He's a collector. That's the great dead thing in him.

The practise of an art is essential to the whole man, not because of what art is but because of what art does to the artist.

The silence was terrible then, as tense as a bridge about to break, a tower to fall; unedurable in its emotion, its truth bursting to be spoken.

The ordinary man is the curse of civilization.

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

Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.

That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see the relationships between objects.

She was a mirror that did not lie; whose interest in me was real; whose love was real.

For him the tragedy of Homo sapiens is that the least fit to survive breed the most.

Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

He had the charm of all people who believe implicitly in themselves, that of integration.

...and his eyes had that splendid innocence, that opaque blue candour of the satanically fallen. ~ The French Lieutenant's Woman

Edith Sitwell's interest in art was largely confined to portraits of herself.

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

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

Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want.

Lizards flashed up the pine-trunks like living emerald necklaces.

No doubt our accepting what we are must always inhibit our being what we ought to be.

The height the dupe has fallen is measured by his anger.

All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.

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

And the sky all wild, all free, all wind and air and space and stars.

We talked for hours. He talked and I listened.
It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.

I'm so far from everything. From normality. From light. From everything I want to be.

The privileges of knowledge have to be bought at the cost of the consolations of ignorance.

Write, if you must, because you feel like writing, never because you feel you ought to write.

As if I'd lit a fire in the darkness to try and warm us. And all I'd done was to see his real face by it.

Just a golden body throwing stones aimlessly into the sea.

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

Always we try to put the wild in a cage.

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

...only extroverts cry twice..