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
#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
#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
#5. Death starves us of life. So we learn to fabricate our own immortalities.
John Fowles
#6. To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.
John Fowles
#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
#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
#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
#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
#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
#12. The Choice Spare him till he dies. Torment him till he lives.
John Fowles
#13. Art is a statement of one in the face of all; not a statement by one for the use of all.
John Fowles
#14. One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.
John Fowles
#15. I mean I never feel I feel what I ought to feel.
John Fowles
#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
#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
#18. I'm so far from everything. From normality. From light. From everything I want to be.
John Fowles
#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
#20. And I envy you. You have the one thing that matters. You have all your discoveries before you.
John Fowles
#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
#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
#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
#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
#25. Just a golden body throwing stones aimlessly into the sea.
John Fowles
#26. The dead live."
"How do they live?"
"By love.
John Fowles
#27. We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
John Fowles
#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
#29. The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
John Fowles
#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
#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
#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
#33. They're beautiful. But sad.' Everything's sad if you make it so, I said.
John Fowles
#34. Oh,clever ... what's the use of that? Are they human beings?
John Fowles
#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
#36. There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.
John Fowles
#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
#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
#39. She was a mirror that did not lie; whose interest in me was real; whose love was real.
John Fowles
#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
#41. If anything might hurt her, silence would; and I wanted to hurt her.
John Fowles
#42. Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.
John Fowles
#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
#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
#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
#46. We think we grow old, we grow wise and more tolerant; we just grow more lazy.
John Fowles
#47. For him the tragedy of Homo sapiens is that the least fit to survive breed the most.
John Fowles
#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
#49. I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.
John Fowles
#50. The moon hung over the planet Earth, a dead thing over a dying thing.
John Fowles
#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
#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
#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
#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
#55. If you want to be true to life, start lying about it
John Fowles
#56. Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.'
To live alone?'
To live. With what you are.
John Fowles
#57. Always we try to put the wild in a cage.
John Fowles
#58. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.
John Fowles
#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
#60. We are all in flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo Sapiens.
John Fowles
#61. Everything free and decent in life is being locked away in filthy little cellars by beastly people who don't care.
John Fowles
#62. Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want.
John Fowles
#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
#64. He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.
John Fowles
#65. Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.
John Fowles
#66. Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.
John Fowles
#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
#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
#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
#70. The price of tapping water into every house is that no one values water any more.
John Fowles
#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
#72. Write, if you must, because you feel like writing, never because you feel you ought to write.
John Fowles
#73. We talked for hours. He talked and I listened.
It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.
John Fowles
#74. Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.
John Fowles
#76. He had the charm of all people who believe implicitly in themselves, that of integration.
John Fowles
#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
#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
#79. He's a collector. That's the great dead thing in him.
John Fowles
#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
#81. I knew words were like chains, they held me back ... the act of description taints the description.
John Fowles
#82. The profoundest distances are never geographical.
John Fowles
#83. The evolution of human mentality has put us all in vitro now, behind the glass wall of our own ingenuity.
John Fowles
#84. There cannot be any true leisure until all the world possesses it equally.
John Fowles
#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
#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
#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
#88. Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan
that is the rule.
John Fowles
#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
#90. Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.
John Fowles
#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
#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
#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
#94. He is the same, but everything is different.
John Fowles
#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
#97. ...all cynicism masks a failure to cope.
John Fowles
#98. It's like being halfway through the book. I can't just throw it in the dustbin.
John Fowles
#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
#100. Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band-master who stood against everything creative in the art of his time.
John Fowles
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top