John Fowles quotes - page 4

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)
If you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did. View quote
John Fowles
Everything free and decent in life is being locked away in filthy little cellars by beastly people who don't care. View quote
John Fowles
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. View quote
John Fowles
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. View quote
John Fowles
I do not defend Conchis' decision at the execution, but I defend the reality of the dilemma. God and freedom are totally anti-pathetic concepts; and men believe in their imaginary gods most often because they are afraid to believe in the other thing. I am old enough to realise now that they do sometimes with good reason. True freedom lies between each two, never in one alone, and therefore is never absolute freedom. View quote
John Fowles
All good science is art. And all good art is science. View quote
John Fowles
I saw that this cataclysm must be an expiation for some barbarous crime of civilisation, some terrible human lie. What the lie was, I had too little knowledge of history to know then. I now know it was our believing that we were fulfilling some end, serving some plan, - that all would come out well in the end, because there was some great plan over all. Instead of the reality. There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves. View quote
John Fowles
A novelist has to enter deeper exile still. In most outward ways the experience was depressive, as many young would-be writers and painters who have ever gone to Greece have discovered. We used to have a nickname for the sense of inadequacy and accidie it produced – the ‘Aegean blues'. One has to be a very complete artist to create good work among the purest and most balanced landscapes on the planet...The Greece of the Islands is Circe still; no place for the artist-voyager to linger long, if he cares for his soul. View quote
John Fowles
I played him the Goldberg Variations. If one wishes to reduce a sensitive German to tears there is no surer lachrymatory. View quote
John Fowles
One kind of person is engaged in society without realizing it; another kind engages in society by controlling it. The one is a gear, a cog, and the other an engineer, a driver. But a person who has opted out has only his ability to express his disengagement between his existence and nothingness. Not cogito, but scribo, ergo sum. (John Fowles)
There was a bright wind, it was a Dufy day, all bustle, movement, animated colour.. View quote
John Fowles
It must essentially remain a novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent. View quote
John Fowles
Pois eisai? She wanted to know. Pou pas? The old Homeric questions of the Greek peasant. Who art thou? Where goest thou? View quote
John Fowles
There are people who have an instinctive yet perfect moral judgment, who can perform the most complex ethical calculations like an Indian peasant can sometimes perform astounding mathematical feats in a matter of seconds. Lily was such a person. I craved her approval. View quote
John Fowles
The princess calls, but there is no one, now, to hear her. View quote
John Fowles
To my horror I began to cry...a great cloud of black guilt, knowledge of my atrocious selfishness, settled on me. One day she had said "when you love me (and she had not meant ‘make love to me') it's as if God forgave me for being the mess I am”; and I took it as chicanery, another emotional blackmail, to make me feel essential and give me a sense of responsibility towards her...My monstrous crime was Adam's, the oldest and most vicious of all – male selfishness...Something far worse than lèse majesté. Lèse-humanité. View quote
John Fowles
I did not like the colonel at all. He had eyes like razors...the eyes of a machine. An educated machine... I realised he was drinking less than we were...And that he was playing with me. That he was a realist... Also that Anton was careless with his tongue... View quote
John Fowles
Her voice was completely English. For some reason I had expected a foreign accent; but I could place this exactly. It was my own; product of boarding school, university, the accent of what a sociologist once called the Dominant Hundred Thousand. View quote
John Fowles
He liked to be popular and in place of charm had to dispense alcohol... View quote
John Fowles
The tender pragmatisms of flesh have poetries no enigma - human or divine - can deminish or demean. Indeed, it can only cause them, and then walk out. (John Fowles)
Hypotheses pinned me down, as Gulliver was pinned by the countless threads of the Lilliputians... View quote
John Fowles
By this sinister elision, this slipping from true remorse, the belief that the suffering we have precipitated ought to ennoble us, or at least make us less ignoble from then on, to disguised self-forgiveness, the belief that suffering in some way ennobles life, so that the precipitation of pain comes, by such a cockneyed algebra, to equal the ennoblement, or at any rate the enrichment, of life, 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 that accusing death; and hardened myself, to say nothing of it at Bourani. I was still determined to tell Julie, but at the right time and place, when the exchange rate between confession and the sympathy it evoked looked very likely to be high. View quote
John Fowles
She seemed older to me, over-experienced by travel; needing to be learnt again, and I hadn't the energy. View quote
John Fowles
There's a card in the Tarot pack called The Magus. The magician, conjuror. Two of his traditional symbols are the lily and the rose. View quote
John Fowles