Top 100 John Fowles Quotes

#1. 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

John Fowles Quotes #18444
#2. All would be well when she was truly his; in his bed and in his bank ... and of course in his heart, too.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #19861
#3. You use your life.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #94057
#4. He had not the benefit of existentialist terminology; but what he felt was a very clear case of the anxiety of freedom - that is, the realization that one is free and the realization that being free is a situation of terror

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #123540
#5. Death starves us of life. So we learn to fabricate our own immortalities.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #142858
#6. To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #173746
#7. 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

John Fowles Quotes #182828
#8. Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?'
'For fun?'
'Fun!' He pounced on the word. 'Words are for truth. For facts. Not fiction.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #185439
#9. Not that I will paint in my own way, live in my own way, speak in my own way - they don't mind that. It even excites them. But what they can't stand is that I hate them when they don't behave in their own way.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #200596
#10. 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.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #239069
#11. 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.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #251609
#12. The Choice Spare him till he dies. Torment him till he lives.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #276485
#13. Art is a statement of one in the face of all; not a statement by one for the use of all.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #305542
#14. One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #340486
#15. I mean I never feel I feel what I ought to feel.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #345347
#16. The second cause of failure to enact good stems from conflict of intention. High intelligence leads to multiplicity of interest and a sharpened capacity to foresee the consequences of any action. Will is lost in a labyrinth of hypothesis.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #362718
#17. She was trying to write a novel, it was so slow, you had to destroy so much and start again; so hard to discover whether one was really a writer or just a victim of a literary home environment.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #374448
#18. I'm so far from everything. From normality. From light. From everything I want to be.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #377668
#19. 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.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #382123
#20. And I envy you. You have the one thing that matters. You have all your discoveries before you.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #394260
#21. He said, one has to learn that painting well - in the academic and technical sense - comes right at the bottom of the list. I mean, you've got that ability. So have thousands.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #417808
#22. I could offer no consolation and I do not think he wanted any. There are situations in which consolation only threatens the equilibrium that time has instituted.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #421819
#23. If I could only escape, if I could only escape ... he murmured the words to himself a dozen times; then metaphorically shook himself for being so impractical, so romantic, so dutiless.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #465263
#24. 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. There must be a God and he can't know anything about us.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #484329
#25. Just a golden body throwing stones aimlessly into the sea.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #501085
#26. The dead live."
"How do they live?"
"By love.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #521691
#27. We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #522998
#28. 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

John Fowles Quotes #539956
#29. The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #550129
#30. If you forget everything else about me, please remember this. I walked down that street and I never looked back and I love you. I love you. I love you so much that I shall hate you for ever for today.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #558581
#31. I don't believe in God. And I certainly don't feel chosen."
"I think you may be."
I smiled dubiously. "Thank you."
"It is not meant as a compliment. Hazard makes you elect. You cannot elect yourself.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #572613
#32. The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #584936
#33. They're beautiful. But sad.' Everything's sad if you make it so, I said.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #620456
#34. Oh,clever ... what's the use of that? Are they human beings?

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #633653
#35. 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

John Fowles Quotes #672016
#36. There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #735567
#37. Charles gave his hat to Mary, set his lapels, wished he were dead, then went down the hall and into his ordeal.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #735681
#38. The feeling that he would probably betray me. And I've always thought of marriage as a sort of young adventure, two people of the same age setting out together, discovering together, growing together. But I would have nothing to tell him, nothing to show him. All the helping would be on his side.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #747510
#39. She was a mirror that did not lie; whose interest in me was real; whose love was real.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #834763
#40. 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

John Fowles Quotes #836167
#41. If anything might hurt her, silence would; and I wanted to hurt her.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #840243
#42. Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #842839
#43. Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependant upon it. Even though I arrange for a pleasure; and look forward to it, my eventual enjoyment of it is still a matter of hazard. Wherever time passes, there is hazard. You may die before you turn the next page.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #858413
#44. The two of us in that room. No past, no future. All intense deep that-time-only. A feeling that everything must end, the music, ourselves, the moon, everything. That if you get to the heart of things you find sadness for ever and ever, everywhere; but a beautiful silver sadness, like a Christ face.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #868606
#45. He knew the world and its absurdities as only an intelligent Irishman can; which is to say that where his knowledge or memory failed him, his imagination was always ready to fill the gap.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #888866
#46. We think we grow old, we grow wise and more tolerant; we just grow more lazy.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #899372
#47. For him the tragedy of Homo sapiens is that the least fit to survive breed the most.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #901202
#48. My hatred of crowds, the obviousness of crowds, of anything en masse. Is this why I like little-known books? A general desire to escape the main world.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #906364
#49. I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #911734
#50. The moon hung over the planet Earth, a dead thing over a dying thing.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #916109
#51. People who teach you cram old ideas, old views, old ways, into you. Like covering plants with layer after layer of old earth; it's no wonder the poor things so rarely come up fresh and green.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #931216
#52. It makes me sick,the blindness, deadness, out-of-dateness, stodginess and, yes, sheer jealous malice of the great bulk of England.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #943100
#53. 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

John Fowles Quotes #952834
#54. I knew that on that island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silence, so few meetings that one too easily saw out of the present, and then the past seemed ten times closer than it was.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #959837
#55. If you want to be true to life, start lying about it

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #973421
#56. Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.'
To live alone?'
To live. With what you are.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #977035
#57. Always we try to put the wild in a cage.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #982733
#58. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #999884
#59. So that the smile was not so much an attitude to be taken to life as the nature of the cruelty of life, a cruelty we cannot even choose to avoid, since it is human existence.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1011011
#60. We are all in flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo Sapiens.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1041740
#61. Everything free and decent in life is being locked away in filthy little cellars by beastly people who don't care.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1056172
#62. Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1095283
#63. A look I shall never forget, because it was almost one of hatred, and hatred in her face was like spite in the Virgen Mary's; it reversed the entire order of nature.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1113270
#64. He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1180534
#65. Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1181568
#66. Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1196741
#67. But I think the most harmful change brought about by Victorian science in our attitude to nature lies in the demand that our relation with it must be purposive, industrious, always seeking greater knowledge.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1234840
#68. It was not the mask I was afraid of ... but of what lay behind the mask. The eternal source of all fear, all horror, all real evil, man himself

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1238374
#69. You will see that Charles set his sights high. Intelligent idlers always have, in order to justify their idleness to their intelligence.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1243000
#70. The price of tapping water into every house is that no one values water any more.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1261574
#71. 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

John Fowles Quotes #1307697
#72. Write, if you must, because you feel like writing, never because you feel you ought to write.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1319748
#73. We talked for hours. He talked and I listened.
It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1340439
#74. Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1344307
#75. I am infinitely strange to myself.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1381073
#76. He had the charm of all people who believe implicitly in themselves, that of integration.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1385346
#77. Time in itself, absolutely, does not exist; it is always relative to some observer or some object. Without a clock I say 'I do not know the time' . Without matter time itself is unknowable. Time is a function of matter; and matter therefore is the clock that makes infinity real.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1464093
#78. 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.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1482892
#79. He's a collector. That's the great dead thing in him.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1486296
#80. 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.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1528535
#81. I knew words were like chains, they held me back ... the act of description taints the description.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1543254
#82. The profoundest distances are never geographical.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1566005
#83. The evolution of human mentality has put us all in vitro now, behind the glass wall of our own ingenuity.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1603540
#84. There cannot be any true leisure until all the world possesses it equally.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1645833
#85. I know I can't do things like love by halves, I know I have love pent up in me, I shall throw myself away, lose my heart and my body and my mind and soul to some cad like G.P. Who'll betray me. I feel it.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1648965
#86. 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.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1681790
#87. 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.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1689715
#88. Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan
that is the rule.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1702121
#89. If a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1713342
#90. Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1736366
#91. 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.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1737328
#92. A word ( ... ) is never the destination, merely a signpost in its general direction; and whatever ( ... ) body that destination finally acquires owes quite as much to the reader as to the writer.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1741837
#93. We can sometimes recognize the looks of a century ago on a modern face; but never those of a century to come.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1742925
#94. He is the same, but everything is different.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1754869
#95. a cloud, it would

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1761935
#96. Think what it would be like if you got back to your island and there was no old man, no girl any more. No mysterious fun and games. The whole place locked up forever.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1789810
#97. ...all cynicism masks a failure to cope.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1794141
#98. It's like being halfway through the book. I can't just throw it in the dustbin.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1842330
#99. Evolution did not intend trees to grow singly. Far more than ourselves they are social creatures, and no more natural as isolated specimens than man is as a marooned sailor or hermit.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1846479
#100. Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band-master who stood against everything creative in the art of his time.

John Fowles

John Fowles Quotes #1864966

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