Fowles Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Fowles

Fowles Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

We think we grow old, we grow wise and more tolerant; we just grow more lazy. — John Fowles

Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass; give me plain glass. — John Fowles

Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation. — John Fowles

I am infinitely strange to myself. — John Fowles

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

a cloud, it would — John Fowles

Ask me to marry you."

"Will you marry me?"

"No. — John Fowles

An aphorism is a generalization, therefore not modern. — John Fowles

The ancient Greeks could laugh at themselves. The Romans could not. That is why France is a civilized society and Spain is not. — John Fowles

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

You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. One day you will know what that means, perhaps. And you will smile. Not against me. But with me. — John Fowles

How can one build a better self unless on the ruins of the old? — John Fowles

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. — John Fowles

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

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

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. — John Fowles

I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased. — John Fowles

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

Between skin and skin, there is only light. — John Fowles

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

You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed. — John Fowles

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

Death is the room that is always empty. — John Fowles

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

It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live. — John Fowles

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

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. — John Fowles

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

I hate beyond hate. — John Fowles

An answer is always a form of death. — John Fowles

Moments one knows only death will obliterate. — John Fowles

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

Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical. — John Fowles

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

I needed a new mystery. — John Fowles

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

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

I mean I never feel I feel what I ought to feel. — John Fowles

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

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

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

I happily forgot his little collection of crimped and cramped fruit trees in my own new world, my America of endless natural ones in Devon. — John Fowles

Men go to the ballpark with an assumed knowledge and interest, whereas women need to constantly demonstrate how much they know and care. — Stacey May Fowles

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

Now I understand why you grow so many flowers."
She shifted her head, not understanding.
I said, "To cover the stink of sulphur. — John Fowles

You may wonder how I had not seen it before. I believe I had. But to see something is not the same as to acknowledge it. — John Fowles

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

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

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

...there are times when silence is a poem. — John Fowles

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

But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personality isn't worth translating. — John Fowles

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

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

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

The collection had the eclectic impersonality of a public library. — John Fowles

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

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

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. — John Fowles

Oh,clever ... what's the use of that? Are they human beings? — John Fowles

Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan
that is the rule. — John Fowles

Just a golden body throwing stones aimlessly into the sea. — John Fowles

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

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

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

The Choice Spare him till he dies. Torment him till he lives. — John Fowles

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

Death starves us of life. So we learn to fabricate our own immortalities. — John Fowles

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

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. — John Fowles

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

I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart. — John Fowles

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

They're beautiful. But sad.' Everything's sad if you make it so, I said. — John Fowles

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

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

The profoundest distances are never geographical. — John Fowles

Nice girl, dear boy."
"Oh ... " I shrugged. "You know."
"Most attractive."
"Cheaper than central heating."
"I'm sure. — John Fowles

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. — John Fowles

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

We chase the reward, we get the reward and then we discover that the true reward is always the next reward. Buying pleasure is a false end. — John Fowles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive. — John Fowles

There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid. — John Fowles

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

All pasts are like poems; one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them. — John Fowles

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

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

There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves. — John Fowles

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